Gap Analysis Template
Find, define, and close gaps to help your business reach its potential with the gap analysis template.
Trusted by 65M+ users and leading companies
About the Gap Analysis Template
The gap analysis template helps you identify what’s missing from company products or processes, making it easy to collaborate on and analyze historical performance benchmarks. Sharing information reduces guesswork or conflicting opinions – especially when you focus on your organization’s internal elements and its challenges or opportunities for improvement.
This template can be adapted from the general gap analysis to focus on specific gap analyses for skills, candidates, software, processes, vendors, training, market, data, or security. After you complete a gap analysis, you may want to conduct a SWOT analysis to identify broader strengths and opportunities.
Using this strategic process helps your business compare its current, real-world situation with its ideal goals. Determining what obstacles might prevent teams or individuals from attaining goals sooner allows you to push your organization toward growth and development.
Pinpointing goals, understanding the current situation, and figuring out remaining obstacles allows your team to collaborate on a plan to achieve those goals.
How to use the gap analysis template
Creating and sharing your gap assessment template with your team is easy with Miro's visual workspace. This template can be adapted for any industry. Get started by following these steps:
1. Define your “current state”
Try to pinpoint your business’s problem areas that need improvement or realignment with the company vision. Go for the “big picture” view here – aim to understand all your business does and how its different components are performing.
2. Define your desired “future state”
Getting idealistic here will help you tap into the true potential of your team and the entire organization. Use alongside this template. Your team can then collaborate on creative ways to get closer to where you want to be, or to what success looks like in an ideal world.
3. Locate the gap between the two states and work toward solutions
By adding specific metrics like KPIs, you can focus on opportunities you can measure (such as percentage change, financial value, or increase/decrease in a number of items). These indicators should have baselines you can measure now, to compare to future performance. And, they should ideally be both short-term and long-term.
4. Implement an action plan or identify remedies for your team
Create specific tasks for your team to close the gaps you’ve identified. You can also prioritize tasks based on the difficulty or potential impact of each one.
When to use a gap analysis template
Performing a gap analysis can help your team become better strategic planners. Use it to identify problems, adapt products or services, or change company processes to better align on goals.
Specifically, your organization can use a gap analysis to:
Benchmark company results against external criteria such as industry standards
Analyze your products and services to find new sales and marketing opportunities
Forecast profits
Reveal opportunities for improvement in existing processes
Understand why Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) aren’t met
Discern the difference between a product or service’s current and potential market size
Are there different types of gap analysis templates?
Gap analysis templates are designed to help organizations identify specific areas for improvement. Performance gap analysis templates focus on pinpointing discrepancies between expected and actual performance levels, while market gap analysis templates help identify gaps in the market that the organization can fill. Similarly, skills gap analysis templates are used to identify gaps in employee skills and knowledge. By using these templates, organizations can gain valuable insights into areas of improvement and develop strategies to address them.
Can I customize a gap analysis template to suit my needs?
Gap analysis templates provide a structured approach to identifying gaps between current and desired states. These templates are designed to be customizable, allowing users to tailor them to their specific needs and requirements. This flexibility enables organizations to conduct a more comprehensive analysis that is aligned with their industry, goals, and objectives.
Can I collaborate with others using a gap analysis template?
You can collaborate by sharing the template with team members or stakeholders, allowing them to provide input and work together to analyze and address gaps.
How often should I conduct a gap analysis?
The frequency of conducting a gap analysis may vary depending on the context. Some organizations perform them annually, while others conduct them whenever significant changes occur in their industry or processes.
Get started with this template right now.
Product Roadmap Template
Works best for:
Product Management, Roadmaps
Product roadmaps help communicate the vision and progress of what’s coming next for your product. It’s an important asset for aligning teams and valuable stakeholders – including executives, engineering, marketing, customer success, and sales – around your strategy and priorities. Product roadmapping can inform future project management, describe new features and product goals, and spell out the lifecycle of a new product. While product roadmaps are customizable, most contain information about the products you’re building, when you’re building them, and the people involved at each stage.
Brand Strategy Template
Works best for:
Marketing
Develop a brand strategy for new and existing brands with this fully guided Brand Strategy Template. Find new ways to build your brand and set your business up for success.
Quick Retrospective Template
Works best for:
Education, Retrospectives, Meetings
A retrospective template empowers you to run insightful meetings, take stock of your work, and iterate effectively. The term “retrospective” has gained popularity over the more common “debriefing” and “post-mortem,” since it’s more value-neutral than the other terms. Some teams refer to these meetings as “sprint retrospectives” or “iteration retrospectives,” “agile retrospectives” or “iteration retrospectives.” Whether you are a scrum team, using the agile methodology, or doing a specific type of retrospective (e.g. a mad, sad, glad retrospective), the goals are generally the same: discovering what went well, identifying the root cause of problems you had, and finding ways to do better in the next iteration.
Product Positioning Canvas
Works best for:
Product Management, Planning
The Product Positioning Canvas template aids product managers in defining and communicating product positioning strategies. By analyzing target markets, competitive landscapes, and unique value propositions, this template helps differentiate products in the market. With sections for defining brand attributes, messaging, and market segments, it enables teams to craft compelling positioning statements that resonate with target audiences. This template serves as a guide for aligning product positioning with business objectives and driving market success.
Product Hypothesis Canvas
Works best for:
Product Management, Planning
The Product Hypothesis Canvas template assists product teams in formulating and testing hypotheses effectively. By defining assumptions, success metrics, and validation experiments, this template guides teams through the hypothesis validation process. With sections for articulating problem statements, proposed solutions, and expected outcomes, it ensures that hypotheses are clear, testable, and aligned with strategic objectives. This template serves as a framework for hypothesis-driven product development, enabling teams to validate ideas and make data-informed decisions.
Product Canvas Template
Works best for:
Desk Research, UX Design
Product canvases are a concise yet content-rich tool that conveys what your product is and how it is strategically positioned. Combining Agile and UX, a project canvas complements user stories with personas, storyboards, scenarios, design sketches, and other UX artefacts. Product canvases are useful because they help product managers define a prototype. Creating a product canvas is an important first step in deciding who potential users may be, the problem to be solved, basic product functionality, advanced functionalities worth exploring, competitive advantage, and customers’ potential gain from the product.