FREE Product Development Template (Gantt Chart)

Why use our Product Development Template instead of Excel or Google Sheets?

Get started with our Product Development Template in seconds while skipping the hassle involved with Excel or Google Sheets.

Build Gantt charts in minutes, not hours.

No project management experience? No problem. Tom's Planner offers a user-friendly, drag-and-drop interface that's intuitive and easy to learn. Creating Gantt charts is a breeze, saving you time and effort. Compare that to the time-consuming, frustrating, manual formatting-intensive process of building a Gantt chart in Excel or Google Sheets.

Create a Gantt chart in minutes, not hours

Move at the pace of modern business with no learning curve or Googling formulas.

Good luck figuring out how to make a Gantt chart work in Excel or Google Sheets. Excel’s user manual weighs in at a hefty 500+ pages. It takes just five minutes with Tom’s Planner to start planning your first real project plan.

Headache-free collaboration and sharing.

Tom's Planner offers powerful options for sharing and collaborating on Gantt charts, including public links, PDF exports, and team access with customizable permission levels. It’s never been easier to communicate or ensure everyone’s on the same page. Compare that to Excel, where sharing and collaboration mean jumping through hoop after hoop and dealing with confusion and chaos.

How to use Tom’s Planner’s product development template to build and share your product development project.

Getting your project off the ground is as easy as 1-2-3.

Step #1

Click the 'start with template’ button to open the Product Development Template.

Step #2

Register for a free account and watch a short video on using Tom’s Planner. The account is free forever, with no strings attached.

Step #3

You’re all set to use the Gantt chart template. Need additional help? Our AI assistant can create a custom Gantt chart Product Development Template based on your project description.

Start with template

What is a product development template?

You’ve got a great idea for a product. Now you just need to get it out to the market. The problem is that new product development is a pretty challenging process, even for established companies. For startups and smaller businesses, it can seem impossible. A product development template can help improve your chances of success.

A product development template is a document that helps you plan your product and organize everything related to development and going to market. It lets you list tasks, create timelines, assign responsibilities, set priorities, and see the interrelationship between different aspects of the project.

Because of the complexity involved, you’ll want to use a template specifically created for this type of process. Skip the product development template in Excel and choose a Gantt chart.

Why is a product development Gantt chart the better option?

Why choose a Gantt chart like Tom’s Planner for your product development needs? It’s simple. Excel and Google Sheets are great for data entry and management.

However, there’s so much more involved in developing a product and planning your go-to-market strategy. You’ll need a tool that can expand to encompass the unique aspects of your specific product development process.

With a product development Gantt chart, you can do far beyond what Excel or Sheets can offer. You can create timelines, assign tasks, set priorities, handle developmental dependencies, and more.

When to use a product development template

Product development is a drawn-out process. However, there are some specific points in time when a product development template is absolutely essential. These include the following:

Planning Phase:

Take a look at most successful product launches and you’ll find that they all have one thing in common: they were planned in great detail long before development started. Using a product development Gantt chart template allows you to exert great control over the entire process, plan in significant detail, and adjust your plans in real-time.

Resource Allocation:

Product development requires massive resources in the form of talent, time, money, and materials. Using a Gantt chart like Tom’s Planner helps you accurately allocate and manage resources throughout your entire product development plan and avoid unwanted surprises.

Go-to-Market Strategy Development:

Your product development process doesn’t end when the product rolls off the assembly line. You still need to get it in the hands of retailers and customers. Your go-to-market strategy will dictate when, where, and how that will happen, and a Gantt chart is uniquely able to help you plan that process.

With a product development process template like Tom’s Planner on your side, you’ll find that you waste fewer resources and are better able to manage all aspects of the project.

Who should use a product development template?

A product development template provides vital guidance throughout the development process. Some of the most common users include the following:

Engineering Teams:

Engineering teams will play a significant role in the development and production of your new product. These teams can use a product development Gantt chart template to plan materials, product specifications, resource allocation, and more.

Marketing Teams:

Marketing for your new product must begin before production is finalized. Marketing teams can use a product development template to manage responsibilities and create timelines for campaigns.

Sales Teams:

Give your sales teams the ability to work with buyers and others by creating a strategy using a product development Gantt chart template.

These are just some of those who may need access to your product development template.

Start with template

The top three pitfalls to avoid in product development

The road to a successful product launch is littered with potential pitfalls. Avoid these three mistakes to give your company a greater chance of success.

Failure to Plan for Marketing
It’s your marketing team’s job to communicate your product’s unique value to potential customers. However, if you fail to plan for marketing during your product development process, that can’t happen.
Solution:
Make marketing part of the planning process and involve your marketing team from the very beginning.
Not Addressing Key Needs
A product that doesn’t actually address an underlying need won’t succeed. In a worst-case scenario, it might fail entirely.
Solution:
Make sure you understand your audience’s needs and then develop your product around those.
Not Differentiating Your Product Sufficiently
How does your product stand out from those of your competitors? If it’s not sufficiently different, you may not see the gains you hope to achieve. In some cases, your product may fail to see adoption by customers at all.
Solution:
Don’t just iterate. Make your product sufficiently different enough to stand out from the pack.

Skip these three pitfalls and you’ll find that your product development process goes more smoothly and that your product is more successful.

What does a product development template include?

Product development can follow many paths depending on the industry and business in question. While each product development template will vary, some of the things you can plan include the following:

Idea Generation:
What need will your product solve? Has brainstorming been done? Who’s responsible for trend forecasting and has it been completed?
Concept Development:
What’s the overall concept of your product? What are the relevant specifications? Has the concept been visualized and tested? Who is responsible for collecting feedback? What about prototyping?
Feasibility Analysis:
What are the project’s requirements? Has a marketing feasibility study been completed? When is the financial feasibility study due? What about your risk assessment?
Launch Promotion:
How will you get the word out about your product? Who will be in charge of marketing? Will you promote it directly to customers or will you work with retailers to put your product on their shelves?
Post-Launch Review:
You’ll need to collect sales data, analyze customer feedback, analyze the overall market response, review your product’s performance, and conduct a financial analysis to gauge the success of your efforts.

Using a product development Gantt chart template like Tom’s Planner can help you streamline the planning, development, production, and marketing processes while providing more control and flexibility.

Four tips on how to make sure you reach your deadlines

1. Plan for Success

No product achieves success without a great deal of planning. Do your due diligence and plan effectively. Don’t skimp here and you’ll have a much better chance of hitting key deadlines and milestones.

2. Involve Stakeholders

Good communication between different stakeholders is essential for successful product development. A Gantt chart like Tom’s Planner makes communication easier by increasing the visibility of milestones and deadlines.

3. Track Spending

Small businesses often find that the product development process is more expensive than they anticipated. Use your product development template to set a budget and then track expenditures.

4. Clearly Define Steps

Use your product development template to break the process down into steps and clearly highlight dependencies between tasks, subtasks, milestones, and deadlines. Tom’s Planner helps you create visual task tracking to ensure everyone is on the same page.

Gantt charts in Tom's Planner vs in Excel

	Excel	Tom's Planner
Cost	License required	Free version available
Learning curve	Hours	Minutes
Create your first Gantt chart	Hours	Minutes
Making an update in your chart	Several minutes	Seconds (drag & drop)
Sharing charts with others	At some point you will save and email a file titled: version_4_def_usethisversion_reallyfinal.xlsx	Online, one source of truth, always up to date, with no confusion
Look & Feel	Messy	Clean, polished and professional
Dependencies
Filtering
Zoom in/out
Automatic Legend
AI-assist		Let our AI assist do the work for you
Export to image or pdf	Requires workarounds to export	One mouse click

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