Best Product Management Tools — Part 1
Which tools do Product Managers use?
Are you wondering what tools you should use as a Product Manager? Let me minimize your workload, in this article I have curated a list of top Product Management Tools for your Product Stack.
Whatever your experience level is in Product Management, your primary areas of focus will be Market Intelligence, Product Strategy, Product Development, and Lifecycle Management. These tools help you keep up to date in Product management Space.
What are Product Management Tools?
Product Management Tools are applications that help Product Managers and the product team implement parts of or all of the product development process, from ideation to launch. The process may include defining a product roadmap, conducting market, customer, and competitor analysis, deriving product strategy, prioritizing, discovering and delivering products, positioning, pricing, managing product releases, discovering growth, etc.
Things to consider before choosing a tool
- You have to be clear about your budget before choosing one of the tools from the below list. You may be a PM at a small company or a VP at a large tech company. Each case will likely have a different budget. There is a possibility that your company uses freemium services rather than paying for full access.
- Are your external stakeholders or colleagues ready to adopt the tool? Before picking a tool, talk to your users, get their opinions, know your level of users and keep hierarchies in mind.
- Additionally, you need to consider how much data you can share with third parties based on your company’s security protocol.
The below section contains a number of categories that will help you choose the right Product Management Tools.
Brainstroming
Brainstorming tools are specifically designed to help spark ideas and then gather and organize them. Using the below tools, brainstorming can be done remotely while simultaneously recording ideas.
Why you should use a brainstorming tool?
- Your team, including introverts who doubt their creativity, will smash their creative blocks and come up with a pool of super-creative ideas. As a result, creativity, organization, and productivity of the team starts leveling up.
- The intuitive interface make your work more entertaining and inspire your creativity in the long run.
- In contrast to a traditional brainstorming process, they produce divergent thinking and provide you with great flexibility in considering many more options.
Miro: With Miro, you can do everything — from brainstorming to prototyping. Conduct meetings, workshops, user experience research and design, create diagrams and mind maps, and plan strategic projects.
Coggle: Coggle allows you to create and share mindmaps and flowcharts online. If you’re taking notes, brainstorming, planning, or doing something awesomely creative, Coggle makes it super simple to visualize your ideas.
Xmind: More Ideas, More Possibilities. Great products often begin with a small idea. Starting a project with a mind map is extremely helpful. It might surprise you how much difference and achievement it can make in the long run if you use it to record every idea in meetings. Check the pricing plan for your team.
MindMup: Brainstorm, create presentations and document outlines with mind maps, and publish your ideas online and to social networks. They offer a separate tutorials section to help users learn how to use the tool.
LucidChart: If you want to turn your product ideas into flowcharts, LucidChart is the best option over Draw.io. It is possible to use this tool to design various types of databases, architectures, ER diagrams, UML diagrams, and whatever else one can imagine. In addition, it offers integrations with many third-party apps, including Jira, G Suite, Dropbox, and Confluence.
My favorites are Miro and Xmind. I’d love to hear your picks in the comment section.
Product Roadmap
Creating a product roadmap is the fundamental step in Product management. Below are the list of roadmapping tools widely used by Product Managers across the world:
ProductPlan: Allows you to create a product roadmap and share it with your team.
Roadmunk: It is an end to end roadmapping tool. Allows you to capture customer feedback and prioritize what to build next.
AHA: A web based product strategy and roadmapping software.
Airfocus: Airfocus falls into 2 categories — Roadmapping and Prioritization tool. It helps you decide what to build next confidently by replacing subjective guesswork with highly informed product decisions based on your standardized prioritization framework.
Prioritizing
A product manager must always prioritize his or her work, their backlog of features. You should know when to drop things that don’t work. You can do that in an organized manner by using these tools:
Hygger: It helps Product Team focus on what their customers need, prioritize what to build next, and develop it using Kanban or Scrum.
Feature Upvote: Allows you to centralize all your feedbacks in one online board.
Productific: It is a SaaS roadmap feedback tool that helps you choose the best ideas for your roadmap.
Design
The stakeholders won’t understand your product idea if they can’t visualize it. That’s when these tools come to your save:
Figma: Design, prototype, and collaborate in browser and in real time. Send out a link to collect feedback, receive change requests, and allow stakeholders to make copy updates in your designs.
Sketch: A easy to use design tool for Mac users.
Wireframe / Mockups
Some of the best collections to create wireframes or mockups:
Balsamiq: UI wireframing tool that simulate the experience of sketching on a paper/whiteboard on your computer itself.
Marvel:Rapid prototyping, testing and handoff for modern design teams
Prototyping
Implement your ideas into tangible forms from paper to digital using these prototyping tools:
InVision: Turn your web and mobile designs into interactive prototypes and mockups. Take your designs from ideas to development.
Framer: No code required. Create a functional prototype faster with framer.
Project and Task Management
It is impossible to complete a process without breaking it down into subprocesses and assigning it to a team and following up on it. In terms of project management, the following tools are the most effective.
Asana: Organize your work to collaborate with your team effectively.
Jira: A software development tool by Atlassian for Agile teams.
Trello: Allows you to collaborate, manage projects with lots of free templates.
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