What are product management tools of the trade? What is in your software stack?
Which product management tools you choose for your tech stack depends on your role, team and company.
Every few months, I get a call or an email from a friend on a new job. They ask me for my latest list of favorite product management tools. Since I’m kind of a software product junky, I’ve been keeping a running list of recommendations. Here they are. (Updated for 2019!)
Project Management
The first order of business for most teams is to organize the project flow. Start here if you are starting from scratch.
If you are joining an existing team, they will almost always have something for Project Management. The question is: Does it work for Product Management?
Remember the difference between project management and product management. It’s not for Product to dictate how Engineering gets its work done but rather what they work on. However, you can’t do this if you don’t have good project management.
When it comes to Project Management, here is what you need:
- Schedule Management to manage your roadmap and market timing
- Cost Estimates to understand feature tradeoffs
- Resource Management to understand who can do what, when and where there are team gaps
Check out your options carefully and decide what is best for your organization.
Agile Project Management
Lean
These tools lead in the simple and inexpensive category. None take more than an afternoon to set up. However, they can be limited for larger product teams managing multiple products.
Growth
These tools are the favorites for startups looking for a long term solution they can grow with. They offer entry-level pricing, robust features, with the cost of a more complex implementation.
Enterprise
These tools target the enterprise that is looking for a flexible tool. Jira is the most popular crossover tool. Don’t expect to set these tools up in a single afternoon. However, with complexity comes great flexibility.
Waterfall Project Management
For some engineering environments, waterfall planning is still the preferred approach.
Waterfall is still useful for coordinating projects across business groups. Product Managers often have to coordinate initiatives across Engineering, Marketing, and Sales. Sometimes, a simple high level Gantt works better than a Kanban.
If waterfall project management is your thing, there are plenty of tools out there.
Lean
These tools lead in the simple and inexpensive category. They are best suited for small startups and single departments.
Enterprise
These tools target the enterprise that is looking for a flexible tool. You may get up and running fairly quickly, but expect an investment to get the most out of them.
Product Management Suites
Product management suites have emerged in the last five years as essential product management tools to help PMs separate the what of Product Management from the how of Project Management.
A good product management suite includes:
- Backlog Management for organizing, tagging, and prioritizing features
- Roadmap Visualization for communicating plans
- Wiki for sharing product requirements and research
- Idea & Feedback Management for analyzing inbound feedback from users
- Resource & Cost Management to analyze feature costs and tradeoffs
Market Leaders
These companies were the first movers that defined the category.
Rising Stars
These companies are a new generation of startups trying to build a better mousetrap.
Product Roadmap Tools
Tired of road mapping in PowerPoint? Product Roadmap Tools offer a solution for communicating the roadmap at the major initiative level. These tools help you manage roadmap versions across customers, management, sales, and analysts.
Is your project management suite is robust enough to cover backlog management and the other areas of product management? A roadmap tool completes your product management tools with business planning and prioritization.
Market Leaders
These companies were the first movers that defined the category. Both integrate with Jira and other project management tools.
Wikis
No set of product management tools is complete without a place to document requirements. But what if your company’s existing tools don’t include a robust wiki?
Not everyone works with the typical Jira + Confluence stack. A lot of popular project management alternatives don’t offer robust wikis. Plus, every department needs a wiki, not just Product & Engineering.
Here are some of the best options to fill the gap.
Market Leaders
These tools are among the most common choices for enterprises and well funded startups.
Rising Stars
Check out your options carefully and decide what is best for your organization.
Open Source
For those in the DIY category, check out this list of open source tools. However, be prepared to invest some time in setup and maintenance.
Voice of the Customer
Voice of the Customer solutions provide tools for capturing feedback from your market. These product management tools will help you build a data driven culture.
360° Product Feedback
These tools offer a solution to capture ideas from every corner: an ideas portal, in-app user feedback, and customer facing team members.
Idea Management
Captures feature requests in an ideas portal where customers and team members can comment and vote on them. This comes with some product management suites, but SoapBox is the best of breed solution.
App Survey Intercepts
Captures feedback through those little pop-up surveys in your product. These surveys catch the user in context, when they’re more likely to respond.
Feedback Widgets
Tired of cryptic bug tickets with weird descriptions? These tools make it easy for the user to share screenshots and visual feedback through in-app widgets.
Surveys
Survey tools abound, but these are my go-to survey products.
Lean
- SurveyMonkey has long been a leader in the space
- SurveySparrow is a rising star with robust features
- Typeform specializes in the niche of user friendly surveys.
Enterprise
- Qualtrics is the heavyweight for major enterprises and corporations from software to pharmaceuticals.
- SurveyGizmo has been the more robust tool of choice for product managers looking for more features. Once a self-service tool, the company has recently entered the enterprise market.
Product Analytics
User Analytics are the product management tools at the heart of data-driven decisions.
Marketing Analytics
These general user analytics product will provide basic insights into product usage but focus more on marketing data such as acquisition channels, conversion rates, and bounce rates.
Product Metrics
These are the leaders in a new generation of tools focused on product analytics.
Mobile App Product Analytics
For those in the mobile space, these products specialize in mobile applications.
Customer Data Infrastructure
Too many user analytics tools across marketing, product, engineering, and CS? Can’t commit to one tool? Segment offers the one platform to bind them all together.
Enterprise
- Adobe Analytics (Omniture) – Omniture was the original user analytics tool in 1996. Today, Adobe leverages this highly evolved product for the Enterprise Market
User Observation
Observing users using the product is critical to developing customer empathy. When you have a large user base, you need a product management tool to scale user observation. These are the tools that product managers and UX designers use most.
Market Leaders
These companies were the first movers that defined the category.
Competitive Intelligence
PMs need to be ahead of everyone when it comes to tracking the competition. Don’t be caught off guard. Staying on top of the competition means keeping product management tools that track:
- Competitor News such as acquisitions, new products, and major customers
- Pricing Changes from all those user-friendly pricing pages if they have themFeature
- Product Feature Changes from your competitor’s product pages on their website
- Product Positioning Changes from their website homepage
- Social Media Mentions from customers and analysts
Lean
Lean teams need to set up these basics at a minimum.
- Google Alerts
- LinkedIn Premium
- A Team Wiki
- Web Monitoring
Web Monitoring
For teams with more resources, these tools offer premium options.
Technographics
These products were designed for generating sales leads and analyzing web sites. If you work with tech that is embedded in a web site (like marketing automation or user analytics), these tools can help you understand your market.
Review Sites
Check out what users are saying about you and your competitors on the major review sites.
Company Data
Don’t forget to check out the old school stuff: public data on your competition.
Wireframing
Wireframing software are important product management tools for explaining product concepts and features.
Web Tools
Today, most PMs are using web tools for wireframing because of the collaboration features they provide.
Desktop Tools
Freelancers and individuals who want to cut the cord and don’t need to share as much can use desktop tools. These tools let you work on your desktop and share to the cloud when you’re ready.
Enterprise
For enterprise teams, these original market leaders offer the robust features larger companies need.
HTML Prototyping
Tech PMs often need product management tools to make a quick edit to a prototype or just point out a fix. These are cheap HTML editors that won’t break the budget.
HTML Editors
What’s the equivalent of Sketch for HTML? For technical PMs who want to grab a web page and make some modifications to the code, here are popular HTML Editors:
Web App Prototyping
Need to prototype an app real quick? Don’t have a team to build one? For those budding entrepreneurs who want to put together their first version of the product, there’s Bubble.
Graphic Design & Sketch Tools
PMs don’t usually do graphic design. However, these tools will enable you to grab a product page and sketch out feature concepts or something as simple as “This needs fixing.”
Screenshot Tools
- Techsmith
- Snag It
- Camtasia
Graphic Design & Editing
Product Dashboards
Once your stack of product management tools is complete, you’ll want a tool to pull all the data into once place. Business Intelligence Dashboards will help you build a culture of data driven product management. In a data driven culture, you want a virtuous circle between identifying the market needs, building the product they want, promoting the product back to them, and closing the right sales to validate your decisions.
Business Intelligence Dashboards can bring all that data together.
360° Product, Sales & Marketing
These tools will connect with both with project management tools and your sales and marketing suite for full analysis of cost, revenue, and promotion.
Sales & Marketing
These tools connect with sales and marketing tools but have limited connectors for product and engineering tools.
Enterprise
These tools will connect with most data sources, but they come with a cost of time and money.
Ross Reynolds works a product manager in brand protection and media. He currently is VP of Product & Marketing for Marketly, a startup in Silicon Valley. He likes building products and helping new ventures grow.
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