AS YOU MANAGE YOUR product development, you’ll produce many documents, guides, checklists, and other artifacts. This list is a summary of the artifacts you should expect to produce throughout your product life cycle. You will probably need them all, so they’re presented in no particular order. You can find templates for some of these artifacts available for download from www.shippinggreatness.com.
An on-call rotation—copied into a wallet-sized list of pagers and cell phone numbers.
A wiki on “Who to contact” in the case of problems, emergencies, or questions. This should include owners and contact information for legal, PR, marketing, the product team, engineering, and network operations (or whatever your production infrastructure equivalent is).
A mission statement.
A clear strategy for the next two years.
A one-page document that summarizes the who/what/why/when/ how of your product.
A product requirements document, also known as a functional spec.
A press release.
Wireframe mocks or napkin sketches.
An internal FAQ with a subset of questions tagged for an external FAQ as preliminary support content.
A communications document that covers your key message, potential dangerous questions, and responses to those questions.
T-shirts for when you launch.
A development schedule that includes testing time.
A two-year roadmap.
For infrastructure projects, an internal customer list and schedule of adoption.
For externally facing products, a trusted tester list.
A feature request list, with the top three features requested by customers highlighted (internal and external).
An open issues list with the status of those open issues clearly marked.
Ongoing meeting notes. It’s nice to have a document that contains all the historical meeting notes for the project.
A release plan/protocol.
A production change list of what features were released and when. Very useful when troubleshooting customer problems.
A production design document that forecasts growth projections and hardware allocation requirements.
Patent filings, trademark filings, and copyright filings.
A privacy statement.
Great metrics—including internal dashboards and a few sanitized metrics for external consumption.
Screenshots for slides/presentations/reviews/launches.
Quarterly objectives for your team and previous quarterly objectives with status marked clearly.
A bug dashboard and list of bugs that block each release.
Cause of error reports or postmortems.
Meeting notes and schedules for: your team’s weekly meeting, UI review, product review, engineering review, bug triage, legal reviews, weekly business development, and weekly customer support check-ins.