In this article we’ve compiled 15x real product review examples, from companies like Duolingo, Intercom, Linkedin, Stripe, and from product leaders at companies like Meta, Asana and Google.
A product review is an assessment of a product’s impact and quality. It can be for net new feature ideas, or for existing product changes or experiments.
Product Reviews should be accelerators. Acceleration comes in two forms:
- Constructive refinement: better choices, better thinking, more input
- Decision making: triggers to move forwards in one direction or the other
As with any meeting, they’re only as useful as the preparation, the people in the room, and the process.
Let’s get into how people run great sessions by looking at some real product review examples now.
List of Product Review Examples
Product Review Examples with Templates
Context:
Duolingo believe in efficient, highly structured product reviews. They have 3 potential formats:
- Ideas: 1 pagers for early stage thinking
- Concepts: 1.5 pagers for concepts with initial designs
- Spec reviews: for fully developed features
The processes they’ve developed to keep them effective include:
- 10 min presentation time for every review
- Reviewers give feedback in a specific order, which means the meeting always runs the same way, is time capped, and everyone knows what’s expected
On top of that they’re open to anyone in the company who wants to attend. Senior product leaders at the company attend product reviews daily, with two aims:
- Inputting to teams: improving outputs and keeping high quality work moving at speed
- Scaling judgement across the organization: this is product reviews as coaching
“When senior leaders at Duolingo participate in daily product reviews, they’re transmitting judgment patterns to everyone in the room. Junior team members learn by observing what “good looks like” in practice, not just by receiving written feedback.” – Ben Erez & Nickey Skarstad, Director of Product at Duolingo
What’s good about this product review example:
As promised, it’s a 1.5 pager for a concept review. Clear goals are set at the top of the paper, making it clear what the meeting output needs to deliver. The document contains context and background information, so a casual reader can understand why the work matters and what it’s trying to achieve.
It also contains visuals of the proposed design, plus some explanation about what the design is trying to achieve and how it will impact critical company goals (daily active users, current user retention rate).
“Nickey mentioned that people who spend a few years building product at Duolingo tend to develop stronger product sense than they would elsewhere and she thinks this ritual is a big part of why. Having also worked at Airbnb and Etsy, that says a lot.” – Supra Insider podcast, listen here
Context:
Deep Nishar, the ex-SVP of Products and User Experience, shared his product review principles and process in a blog, and even went so far as to digitize the template in Coda. You can access it there.
The template is set up to set the right roles for the right people, plus can be connected to Slack to send out trigger notifications that explain to people what is expected of them in the product review ahead of time.
What’s good about this product review example:
It’s super structured. Deep suggests holding 2 x 30 min product review sessions per product, plus a 10 min follow up after this to check on action item progress.
He believes in
- Having the right people in the room
- Clarifying their roles and what’s expected of them
- Putting each product review through a clear cycle to get to outcomes
- Listening first, then asking questions: using a written format if possible
- Talking stick approach: orderly, evenly distributed feedback using a talking stick approach to avoid the HiPPO problem
- Being rigorous about the session leading to clear feedback, and closure (action items)
- Having a follow up meeting to review responses to feedback items and the action plan
This is a really good and short read, and by the end of it you’ll have a strong process, and a working template. If you’re not sure where to start, start here.
“To encourage [active listening], no questions were allowed during the presentation (except for occasional clarifying questions). Instead, reviewers wrote questions down and addressed them afterwards….If someone has nothing material to add or if they agree with what has already been suggested, they can +1 a previous comment and cede their time to the next person.” – Deep Nishar
Context:
Will Lawrence is the co-founder and CEO of Greenlite.ai, a Y-combinator backed platform which serves financial institutions with AI agent software to tackle financial crime. He’s also ex-Whatsapp, Meta, and used to write his own Substack, Product Life.
One of his posts shares how he runs product reviews, and an action orientated template from his time at Meta to make them productive.
What’s good about this product review example:
Both the write up and the template are useful.
The write up contains practical advice on how to run a good product review. There’s advice on how to define your discussion points and keep the meeting output focused, to which documents to send round, when, and what asks to make of stakeholders when you send them.
“Speaking of error: In my first product review, I remember presenting for 25 minutes and asking for feedback on this presentation for the last 5. Don’t do this!
The main goal of a product review is to get feedback from leaders. This is in the form of agreement on a chosen path (alignment), a decision to unblock the team (decision) or comments/questions about the team’s direction (visibility).
This is why encouraging discussion and engagement on a handful of key points is the best use of time. Refrain from presenting unless it is a specific area you need feedback on.” – Will Lawrence
The template keeps things focused, with discussion points, and agreements made in the meeting. They’re short, snappy, and labelled clearly with the required output from the group.
Context:
This set of Stripe product review questions comes from an interview with one of Stripe’s early PMs, who helped develop multi product lines. It contains a wealth of good advice about focusing in on your user, especially on understanding who they are, and how they experience your product – from every angle, be that in product, or via API calls.
“Stripe would also do a monthly product review to dig into the details. Specifically, there is a set of 12 questions that Stripe leaders ask in every product review. And there’s a very strict guidance that you cannot move on to question two until you’ve sufficiently answered question one.” – Tara Seshan, ex-Stripe PM
What’s good about this product review example:
Product reviews are ultimately only as good as the feedback you receive and the decisions which are made as a result. So far we’ve talked about lots of formats to present product thinking, but we haven’t covered how product reviews should be interrogated.
This process of defining the 12 key questions that every product must answer to be built ensures rigour. It helps create an internal product development checklist that keeps development aligned to principles, and structures and enhances feedback. Only once these questions are answered well can something be built.
It also ensures that any new product doesn’t get built before the core thinking is done in depth.
Question 3: “Can you share a link to your evidence of why that need is actually a need and not a made-up need? “Is it a problem that’s actually an issue for companies and do they feel it urgently? Does it matter enough? Is it on their list of top five things that they’re worried about?”
Context:
Ben Williams is a recognised product led growth expert, with deep expertise in in PLG motions, product led sales and dev tool growth. His particular sweet spot is in dev led B2B SaaS businesses. He now runs PLGeek, where offers advisory services and offers a great free newsletter.
What’s good about this product review example:
Being an action focused PLG leader, Ben’s review is retrospective and is focused on impact and learnings, to allow teams to keep iterating towards successful and robust product led growth motions. It’s intended to be completed weekly.
This sort of cadence, and specific review cycle is very common in any team working on GTM, where motions have to be trialled, iterated, modified and measured weekly.
It’s focused on:
- Concrete data points
- Driven by experimentation
- Learnings good and bad
It also contains a How to Guide to teams looking to fill it out, and example inputs. The majority of the advice is about presenting data properly, bringing together different types of insights, concrete articulation of learnings and actions to be taken as a result.
This one is a must for any team in experimentation or product led growth.
Context:
Henrik Ståhl is the current Head of Digital at Hammarby Fotboll club in Sweden. He’s a journalist turned product manager with deep experience in the content space. He writes a great Medium and also makes some useful templates in Miro.
What’s good about this product review example:
The Miro board contains 2 different templates, and 2 examples:
- An internally focused product review template for PMs and their teams
- A consumer, or stakeholder template designed for communicating outside the team
- Two example consumer templates pre-populated for Anker ear buds, and for Miro
There’s a how to guide on the board. The templates are detailed guides with example inputs such as:: team associated with the product, context, goals, performance review, revenue / metric outputs, bug reports, user feedback and next steps.
Context:
Natasha works as a principal product designer at Figma. This is a publicly available ‘Mobile Product Review template designed to help you present ideas, get alignment, and gather feedback effectively.’
What’s good about this product review example:
This is a light, well structured template, best used for selling product concepts to non-product stakeholders. Format, contextual information, level of detail depend on the environment, audience seniority and how quickly and seamlessly you need to convey information. This would be a great format for an all hands, or leadership run through. It’s minimal and succinct.
Context:
This is another publicly available template from the Figma team. It’s a slide deck that conveys metric, user, competitor, feature and conceptual information in an easy to digest format.
What’s good about this product review example:
It’s a very visual, high level presentation that aims to explain the product to a senior or broad audience. It wouldn’t be a suitable format to problem solve with your manager, but would work well with a senior group, or another team. Other strengths include the alignment graph on the final slide, a good way to gauge temperature.
Product Review Examples: Best Practices
Context:
This is a great contribution to UX Collective from Dan Slate, a senior product leader at Wealthfront.
It covers everything from defining what product reviews are and are not, articulating what’s often bad about product reviews, and practical advice to run them well, including strong words for founders and executives to ensure they stay on track.
“Every product review, held on a regular basis with the founders, or sometimes the entire executive team, is different.
One week the team is fending off tactical product ideas and solution suggestions which undermine their confidence in their ability to figure out the “how” for a particular customer problem.
The next week, they’re wrestling with unpredictable questions which send the meeting careening down a path the team isn’t prepared to provide a confidence-inspiring answer. After each product review, the team feels less confidence in their work, less clear on the direction they should be pursuing, and less autonomy” – Dan Slate
What’s good about this product review example:
It’s grounded in real world scenarios that every PM will recognize. There’s clear dos and don’ts, a slide you can lift out of the box to present to senior stakeholders to keep them under control, and good advice for making the meetings enjoyable and practical.
The definition of a product review is also strong: for Dan, this isn’t a mentorship, or an execution session, it’s customer focused. Product reviews are about creating clarity around user needs and alignment about how users derive value from the product, in order to enable better decision making.
“There is no one single definition of a “product review” but in practice, I define it as being a regular meeting to discuss validated customer insights and the impact of those insights have on current and future product decisions.
The product review is an opportunity to review how effectively a product is delivering customer value and to discuss open strategic questions to enable the product team to make better decisions and bigger bets.” – Dan Slate
Context:
“The biggest thing on Product Forum was that this is going to be a decision-making meeting – the only time we run a Product Forum is when there are [big] decisions to be made.” – Paul Adams, CPO Intercom
Intercom share helpful advice on building, organizations and product on their blogs and podcasts. Their focus is on clarity and speed, which equally covers rituals like product reviews. Their view is that a ritual should only occur if it increases decision and execution speed.
Their product forums are a way to codify who has the final call, in order to increase efficiency overall and to accelerate decision making. For big launches or features, that might mean holding a product forum every week to keep things moving, For small features, that might be never.
“Another thing I think people don’t interrogate is principles and processes….All of those things are scar tissue. They are baggage, and the only reason they’re worth their weight in salt is if they actually guarantee you a level of consistency such that you can continue to move fast because you depend on things happening, or if they speed you up.” – Des Traynor, CEO Intercom
What’s good about this product review example:
Their meetings are focused on decisions, and include a clear decision making hierarchy. The format is to state up front which decisions need to be made, and an action has to be set against each for the meeting to have been a success. Product forums include all stakeholders, and are run by the relevant program manager.
“The great things that you want to hear in a Product Forum are, “We don’t want feedback on that today.” “We’re not talking about X today.” “It’s too early for talk about Y.”
Or, “Hey everyone, reminder, we decided two weeks ago to not do that. So we can either A: Put on a new agenda for a new Product Forum to talk about revisiting that decision. Or B: move on. Guess what? No one ever wants to revisit the decision. Nor should we, really, if we want to make progress unless something new has come to light.” – Paul Adams, CPO Intercom
End-to-End Reviews replace Product Forums once a feature or product is close to launch. In these they review the end to end customer journey from all perspectives. That might be a new customer journey from blog to ad, to sign up, or an existing user, receiving notifications and emails about a new product.
End to end reviews help to ensure that the whole user journey is well thought through and effective. It’s a way of linking up all the activities and decisions which got made along the way, and seeing if they gel into one coherent and effective journey.
Context:
While Head of Product at Asana, Jackie discussed all things product on Intercom’s podcast, including a key section on product forums, and how they ran them at Asana. Their approach to product reviews is closer to the Duolingo example shared earlier: it’s about developing the teams to make better decisions and products.
“I’ve been at other companies that have a product review, and it really is just a launch gateway. As fast as possible someone comes in and tells you if you can launch or not. They’ll point at a bunch of things and say you’ll have to change all that, and then go and launch it. That’s very much what we did not want to do at Asana.
For us, the main goal is mentorship, because we want to build high quality products in a scalable way. We want to make sure that what we’re getting out the door is not only high quality, but that all of the PMs and designers and engineers start to understand what our quality bar is, and why we think one solution is high quality and another one isn’t.” – Jackie Bavaro
What’s good about this product review example:
Jackie shared Asana’s product development process / checklist, which suggested 3 natural points for product forums, based on decision gateways. The first was when setting goals for a product or feature – what it should actually achieve and why. The second was at design stage – when design feedback or critique was needed. The third was prior to launch as a classic launch review.
The people included in every product forum were the Asana co-founder and product leader, Justin Rosenstein, the head of product (then Jackie) and a representative from PM, UX and Design. They held them every week and blocked 2 hours, but extended as needed.
“It’s one of the most important processes we have at Asana….We want to make sure that what we’re getting out the door is not only high quality, but that all of the PMs and designers and engineers start to understand what our quality bar is, and why we think one solution is high quality and another one isn’t.” – Jackie Bavaro
Context:
This product review advice comes from a 1st Review interview with Todd Jackson about how to be a great PM.
As the PM who led Gmail and the Facebook News Feed, having delivered product reviews to Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg, he has a lot to share, especially when it comes to working with visionary founders. He’s now a partner at First Round Capital having also worked in lead product roles at Dropbox and Twitter.
“Todd Jackson was in a small conference room with a handful of designers, engineers and Mark Zuckerberg. The topic at hand: the Facebook News Feed redesign, intended to declutter the Facebook experience and make it even more engaging…
In this conversation, Jackson had to wear multiple hats. He needed to absorb Zuckerberg’s argument. He needed to advocate for his designers and engineers. And he needed to think through all of the other pieces and people these changes might touch.”
What’s good about this product review example:
Evergreen advice includes:
- Prepare this meeting thoroughly: it’s the PM’s role
- Understand detail and the big picture: be able to zoom in and out
- Be a shit umbrella, not a funnel: take the hits, protect the team
- Keep your presentation to 10-15 slides: appropriate detail for the audience
- Understand the audience: prepare what ops, founders, marketing etc all need to know
- Make sure decisions get made: even if you don’t like them
- Specific tactics to deal with founders: from leaving yourself wiggle room, to finding out how serious they are about their latest big idea
“If derailments crystallize into serious decisions, Jackson recommends pinning founders down to brass tacks. “Ask them directly: ‘So is that a decision?’” he says. “Then make your next actions clear: ‘We’ll follow up on that point and come back to you.’”
How to do the Product Review Right by Doing it Wrong
Context:
This product review example comes from a talk given by the folks behind Flides (Figma Slides) on how a product review should be run, and what it is and is not for.
What’s good about this product review example:
It’s funny, for starters. Doing the product review wrong is a clever device to shred the majority of product review meetings we’ve all attended, from inconsequential voting, fake ‘assent’ points, to confused presentations. There’s something everyone will recognize here.
Additionally they argue that a product review isn’t actually about making decisions.. Instead they suggest it should be about winning trust – that the team understands the problem space, and will deliver the right solution. That of course comes down to how they run meetings.
Context:
This is an overview from Product HQ’s community, of how senior product leaders running multiple teams can lead a product review to senior executives so that they’re across what’s happening. In it MaryLauran describes her process for running product reviews for executives, and Clement shares his model agenda for making sure they go well.
What’s good about this product review example:
Both share strong processes for making sure a product review conveys information effectively and runs well. For example, MaryLauran recommends post its, so that executives can write down and ‘hold’ their questions, results from user research or feedback, plus a matrix showing project health. Clement proposes a tight agenda, reminding executives of risks and trade offs of changing course.
Context:
Atlassian provide a product critique (review) guide as part of their Agile process materials. It’s a full length article with a walk through of the process, core components of the product review process and questions to ask.
What’s good about this product review example:
It’s a good introductory overview of product reviews, and situates them as part of an overall agile development process, so it’s clear how they sit with other meetings.
Useful information shared includes good advice at who to include in the product review process, their role and when to include them, plus a prompt to remain focused on data – what needle will be moved by this product and why. Finally it includes a useful list of questions to ask to interrogate the product and remain focused.
Wrap up on Product Review Examples
Product reviews are contextual: what works in one company, may not in another. While product reviews work differently for different leaders and in different contexts, some themes emerge: making time for them, prepping them properly, using them to coach teams, and staying focused on decision making. In this article we’ve tried to share real product review examples and formats so you can adapt to your particular context.
More Hustle Badger Resources
[Real Examples]
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FAQs on Product Review Examples
Where can I find a good product review example?
We’ve collated 15 real product review examples from Linkedin, Stripe, Meta and more.
If you’re looking for practical help, thehe best place to start is Deep Nishar’s LinkedIn template in Coda – it’s super structured, publicly available, and even connects to Slack to send trigger notifications.
Deep suggests holding 2 x 30 min product review sessions per product, plus a 10 min follow up to check on action items. He believes in having the right people in the room, clarifying their roles, and being rigorous about the session leading to clear feedback and closure. This is a really good and short read, and by the end of it you’ll have a strong process and a working template. If you’re not sure where to start, start here.
For something more visual, Figma has two publicly available templates – one for mobile product reviews and another slide deck format. They’re minimal, succinct, and work well for presenting to senior groups or all hands meetings.
If you’re working on product led growth, Ben Williams’ PLG Geek template in Notion is focused on impact and learnings. It’s intended to be completed weekly and is driven by experimentation, concrete data points, and clear articulation of learnings and actions. This one is a must for any team in experimentation or product led growth.
How to write a product review with examples?
Product reviews should be accelerators. Acceleration comes in two forms: constructive refinement through better choices and thinking, and decision making to move forwards. They’re only as useful as the preparation, the people in the room, and the process.
Start with clear goals at the top.
If you’re looking for product review examples, we suggest starting with Duolingo. Duolingo’s 1.5-pagers state exactly what the meeting output needs to deliver. The document contains context and background information so a casual reader can understand why the work matters, plus visuals of the proposed design and explanation of how it will impact critical company goals.
Focus on getting feedback, not presenting. As Will Lawrence puts it: “Speaking of error: In my first product review, I remember presenting for 25 minutes and asking for feedback for the last 5. Don’t do this! The main goal of a product review is to get feedback from leaders.” Encouraging discussion on a handful of key points is the best use of time.
Make decisions, not just visibility. Intercom’s product forums exist only when big decisions need to be made. State upfront which decisions need to be made, and set an action against each. As Paul Adams says, “The great things that you want to hear in a Product Forum are, ‘We don’t want feedback on that today.’ ‘We’re not talking about X today.'”
