Plan studies, track interviews, and turn findings into linked product issues — research that ends in action, not a slide deck.
Researchers and PMs running continuous discovery.
Quick answer
The User research template is a ready-made workspace for Researchers and PMs running continuous discovery.
User research template in short
Included when you apply it
Applying this template creates the 1 board below — with every list — and pre-loads 3 sample issues, all yours to edit. The automation rules further down are suggestions you can wire up next; they aren't created for you yet.
A preview of how this template lays out — the boards, their custom workflow states, and where the sample issues land. WIP caps show a badge.
Studies
Onboarding usability study — 8 sessions
Pricing-page comprehension interviews
Churned-customer exit survey
These rules aren't created when you apply the template — they're recipes you can wire up in Settings → Automations once your board exists.
When
Study moves to 'Synthesis'
Then
Create a findings issue and remind the team to add insights
When
Study moves to 'Shared'
Then
Notify the product channel with the readout link
Planned, Recruiting, In field, Synthesis, Shared. Recruiting is a column because it is almost always the real bottleneck, and burying it inside a generic in-progress state hides where studies actually stall. Shared as a terminal state is the deliberate part: research whose output is a document nobody reads has not finished. The study is done when the findings have reached the people who make decisions and are linked to the work they inform.
Every study card should name the decision it will inform and what you would do differently depending on the answer. If no answer changes any action, the study is interesting rather than useful, and it should lose to one that is. This single question kills more wasted research than any prioritisation framework.
Recruiting has the longest lead time and the highest variance, especially for hard-to-reach segments. Get screeners out while you are still writing the discussion guide. Studies that slip usually slipped in recruiting, and the schedule was decided before anyone checked whether those eight people exist and will talk to you.
Sessions clustered into a tight window keep the context fresh and make patterns visible while you can still adapt. Use the same note structure for every session — same headings, same fields — because synthesis across differently-shaped notes is slow and lossy.
A finding is a claim plus the observations that support it, ideally with how many participants showed it and a quote or two. 'Users found onboarding confusing' is not a finding. 'Six of eight could not tell whether the workspace had been created, and looked for a confirmation that does not exist' is one, and it points directly at a fix.
This is the step that makes research compound. Each finding links to the product issues it justifies, so months later the issue can answer why it exists, and the insight log stays searchable across studies. Research that lives only in a slide deck is re-discovered every eighteen months by whoever joins next.
This board encodes one opinion about how the work should run. Here is where that opinion is wrong and something else fits better.
Honest comparisons, including where the other tool wins. Planoda is pre-launch, so nothing below is a benchmark — it is a description of how each product approaches this job.
Dovetail is built for the synthesis half of this: import transcripts, tag at the sentence level, and query patterns across every study you have ever run. That searchable evidence layer is something a board fundamentally cannot provide.
Where Dovetail is better: For analysis, tagging, and finding evidence across studies, Dovetail is better and the gap is wide. The complementary split is study logistics on a board, evidence in a repository.
A Notion research database with a page per study is the most common setup, and the page is the right shape for a discussion guide, notes and a written readout. What is missing is the link into the product work — findings sit in a wiki and the roadmap sits elsewhere.
Where Notion is better: For the readout itself as a readable document that a stakeholder will actually finish, Notion is better than a set of cards. Many teams reasonably write there and track here.
Airtable handles participant management well — a participants table linked to studies, with fields for consent, incentives, segment and last-contacted, so you do not over-recruit the same twelve people. This template has no participant model at all.
Where Airtable is better: For a participant panel with recruitment history and incentive tracking, Airtable's relational model does something this board does not attempt.
Ready to spin this up?
Sign-up takes seconds. We build this template's boards, lists, and sample issues in your new workspace, all yours to edit.
FAQ
Product roadmap
A Now / Next / Later roadmap that flows discovery to ship, with initiative-level grouping and release notes at the end of the pipe.
View templatePRD tracker
Move specs from draft to approved with explicit review gates, so engineering never starts on a half-baked PRD.
View templateFeature requests
A single intake list for customer feature asks, deduped and labeled, so the loudest request isn't the only one you hear.
View template