Product Management Tools: What’s in your Product Stack?
Product Management Tools: What’s in your Product Stack?
Engineers love to talk about their stack. The Stack is a set of tools they use to host, test, deploy and maintain their code. Product Managers have a stack of product management tools, too. The Product Stack includes tools that support the process from discovery through planning, launch, and iteration.
Engineers love to talk about their stack. The Stack is a set of tools they use to host, test, deploy and maintain their code. Product Managers have a stack of product management tools, too. The Product Stack includes tools that support the process from discovery through planning, launch, and iteration.
What tools are used by awesome Product Managers?
First, we need to understand what Product Managers use tools for. In a typical product cycle, you will find these phases:
Product discovery
Product strategy and alignment
Product prototyping and specification
Roadmap planning and execution (Ties it all together)
Results Reporting
Let’s look at our options at each phase and build a killer Product Stack:
If you want to see the product management tools I use, you can jump to the end here.
1. Product discovery
In this phase, product managers are doing customer discovery and market research work to understand the product opportunities. Survey and user research tools are helpful for new and existing products, and calendaring tools are immensely helpful for scheduling conversations with potential customers.
For existing products, the Product analytics tools are listed under 5. Results Reporting are helpful for backward-looking quantitative behavior from existing customers.
Sometimes you want to conduct product discovery with prototypes in hand, in this case, the tools in 3. Product prototyping can also be helpful.
Survey/ Quiz tool
Typeform - Typeform streamlines surveying by making them easy to make, share, and integrate with other platforms. Typeform is great at gathering large quantities of information from multiple sources.
SurveyMonkey - Surveymonkey is great for company research and development. It boasts a multitude of customization features and template options to offer the best survey for any situation.
GoogleForms - Google Forms is very user friendly and offers different types of surveys and quizzes making information research easy and simple. Unlike its competitors it does not require any additional in-app/ in-software purchases.
User Research
Usertesting.com - Usertesting.com is a website that provides user-friendly customer insights through user response methods, participant selection, and feedback management. The tool’s strength lies in its ease of use and simple setup.
Lookback.io - Typically going for $49/mo for smaller businesses or $99/mo for Enterprise, Lookback.io is a user research tool that gives companies access to remote user research at a great price. Companies can watch customers interact with their product, create time-stamped notes, and easily share with teams and stakeholders.
Fullstory - True to its name, Fullstory gives companies complete qualitative analytics of how users interact and engage with their website. Fullstory includes a smart search engine, user recordings, page insights, and more.
Calendaring
Hubspot - Hubspot Scheduler makes setting up meetings a seamless process by not only connecting to your inbox but your Hubspot CRM as well. The meetings tool allows invitees to view availability before automatically updating your inbox and CRM.
YouCanBook.me - YouCanBook.me removes the hassle of back and forth emailing by showing invitees your availability on your Google or iCloud Calendar before making an appointment.
Calendly - Calendly is a freemium service that integrates with Google or Office 365 Calendar where invitees can view availability before scheduling. There are also additional features such as group scheduling, adding polls, and making events private.
Doodle - Doodle is a great calendaring tool where you can easily set up meetings, view availability, and create group events and poll for the best time and date.
Assistant.to - Assistant.to allows you to choose availability and set up meetings with people. It syncs with Google software and makes sharing through Google Calendar and Gmail effortless.
1:1 scheduling sync’d with 1 Gcal
Arrangr - Arrangr simplifies scheduling by reserving and releasing meeting slots based on your availability. It can also integrate with most calendars and CRMs, create group meetings, and suggest the optimal meeting location for multiple parties.
Sometimes, looking ahead in your process will reveal other tools that will be helpful in discovery. For instance, product analytics tools used in Stage 5. Results Reporting can be helpful for backward-looking quantitative behavior from existing customers.
If you want to conduct product discovery with prototypes in hand, the tools in 3. Product prototyping can also be helpful.
2. Product strategy and alignment
The whole company needs to come together to build and execute the strategy. To get the organization aligned around a common strategy and vision, the ability to brainstorm together and set Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) is key.
Brainstorm
MiroMiro is an online whiteboard that allows for easy team collaboration whilst simplifying brainstorming, planning, and visualizing ideas. Some of the best features Miro has to offer including its collaborative editing, customizable templates, and mind mapping.
MuralMural is another tool for visual collaboration for companies looking to align ideas across teams. Mural has great communication tools such as voting and commenting, as well as great templates with different map and theme styles.
LucidSparkLucidSpark is a virtual whiteboard that makes organizing messy brainstorms into presentable ideas seamless. Lucidspark boasts multiple integrations, an infinite whiteboard, Breakout boards, and even Miro integration.
OKRs and Goal setting
15five - 15five is a performance management tool that bridges the gap between senior leaders and employee through strategic weekly check-ins to improve clarity and visibility within a company.
Workboard - Workboard is a strategic planning and collaboration tool for large companies and later-stage startups. It allows users to connect OKRs to company goals to visualize progress and performance.
Betterworks - Betterworks is an application where managers can track the real-time progress of individual and company-wide goals to facilitate collaboration and company growth.
7geese - 7geese is another product management tool similar to Betterworks, that tracks OKRs and goal setting to boost employee productivity, engagement, and provide a platform for feedback.
3. Product prototyping and specification
Once a direction is set, it’s time to create prototypes, wireframes, and specifications.
Wireframe/ Mockup tool
Figma - Figma is a cloud-based wireframing tool to make prototyping easier by offering an infinite canvas for your team to collaborate on.
Invision - Invision is a great cloud-based tool for creating complex mockups with your team while remaining user-friendly.
Sketch - With Sketch, you can create and collaborate on prototypes with a powerful vector editor and easy-to-use plugins. It is a great tool for beginners.
Specifications
You can of course write specifications on a google doc. But writing specifications in a tool that integrates with your planning process is very important for productivity. These tools provide such an advantage. Some agile teams do away with writing a wordy specification, and instead, put their specifications directly into their roadmap planning tool or Jira.
Atlassian ConfluenceAtlassian Confluence allows users to is a remote-friendly team workspace that includes best-practice templates and tools for easy note-taking, instant feedback, and simple sharing.
Notion - Notion is an easy-to-use, simplified approach to note-taking tools where you can write, edit, and organize documents. It has many additional features such as adding checklists, tables, and calendars.
Product Onboarding
Onboarding users well is a table stakes requirement for today’s modern SaaS products. You can build your own, but you can also leverage one of these off-the-shelf products.
Skilljar - Skilljar makes product onboarding easy for both companies and users by making the process of creating and publishing courses straightforward. Skilljar also allows you to integrate with other systems like Zoom, SurveyMonkey, and CRMs.
Walkme - Walkme is a great product onboarding tool where you can create interactive pop-up walkthroughs on your website or app to create the best experience for your customers.
Inline Manual - Inline Manual’s onboarding platform allows you to supplement your service with interactive tutorials and support articles without needing to code anything.
Userpilot - Userpilot is another great no-coding-needed onboarding tool where you can create an in-app walkthrough and messaging system.
4. Roadmap planning and execution
Many teams plan their roadmaps on spreadsheets. That’s fine until you have more than 20 features to plan, or more than 1 Product Manager. As you grow, you’ll want to adopt a roadmap tool that helps you visualize and manage your backlog of ideas and your engineering resources. This way you can make sure you’re investing your precious development cycles in the right place.
Product Portfolio Management Tools
Dragonboat - Dragonboat is a modern PPM tool for CPOs and their teams to connect OKRs with initiatives, plan data-driven roadmaps, forecast resources and automate portfolio reporting all in one place. Unlike traditional PPM tools, Dragonboat can be adopted incrementally and doesn’t require engineering process changes. Dragonboat works well for outcome-driven product teams who need to deliver both customer needs and business results.
Aha! - Aha is a strategy-focused product roadmap tool that offers workspaces for each product team to manage their products from ideas to features before passing on to engineering teams for execution. Aha works well for product managers who work independently with little dependencies.
Jira Align - Jira Align is a robust enterprise PPM tool with all the bells and whistles you can imagine. Users can centralize data in one place to perform PI planning, prioritization, and tracking. Jira Align provides portfolio visibility holistically. Jira Align works best for teams with mature SAFe practice and a uniformed agile practice across teams. Jira Align is fairly expensive and can take considerable effort to implement.
Roadmap Visualization
Productboard - Productboard focuses on collecting, categorizing, and scoring customer requests, linking them to product features to create product roadmaps. It also allows you to create a product roadmap that’s visible publicly, for customers.
Productplan - Productplan is a roadmap visualization tool. It enables product managers to score features, and create /share visual product plans easily.
Prodpad - Prodpad is a lean product-management-based road-mapping tool. It supports Idea collection, feature prioritization, visualizing roadmaps, and creating Kanban-style roadmaps. Prodpad works well as a lightweight product tool.
Jira Advanced Roadmap - previously known as Portfolio for Jira - it’s a hybrid of road mapping and reporting tools integrated with Jira. Although it provides the planning and tracking of a typical PPM tool, the overall capability in setting up strategy, allocation, and product management is light.
5. Results Reporting
Capturing results helps you pivot the product and business. As such, these product management tools are must-haves for any mature product.
Product Analytics
Pendo - Pendo provides customer analytics on user insights to support product management, customer success, marketing, sales, and UX teams. It also makes it easy to communicate product updates with customers as well as feedback through polling and questionnaires.
Amplitude - Amplitude’s analytics are specific, with customer-journey tracking, users can dive deep into their experience and piece together a holistic view of customer satisfaction.
Hotjar - Hotjar offers a lot of great features in its free version alone, and is a great product analytics tool for companies who sell their products online and want to see which pages drive the most traffic.
Mixpanel - Mixpanel is a product analytics tool that allows you to easily interpret user behavior over time with its simple Mixpanel dashboard that can all be accessible on your desktop as well as mobile.
Heap - Heap Analytics was built for medium to large companies to track every user action taken on your website, and unlike its competitors, it requires no IT integration.
Google Analytics - Google Analytics is a free analytics software best suited for small to medium retail websites. Users have access to many features such as custom reports, data visualization tools, and easy integration with multiple tools.
Localytics - Localytics is one of the most user-friendly analytics tools, allowing you to easily log and manipulate metrics with filters and tags.
Kissmetrics - Kissmetrics is a powerful analytics tool that provides valuable insights on customer actions and allows you to track vital conversion data. It works great for A/B testing and data-driven marketing.
BI and visualization tools
Domo - Domo is a business intelligence tool for businesses of all sizes that allows you to create and share countless visuals as well as analyze large data sets easily from one platform.
Tableau - With Tableau, you can create interactive graphics to visualize your data with multiple format options. It works well with small and large businesses.
Qlikview - Qlikview is a visualization tool where users can create applications backed with analytics and has been praised for its easy-to-use tools.
Microstrategy - Microstrategy allows you to create custom reports and comprehensive analytics that can be easily exported. It works best with bigger companies.
Plot.ly - Plotly is a data visualization company that has a wide array of graphs to choose from to display your company insights and make ideas interactive.
Looker - Looker is a user-friendly business intelligence tool for small and medium businesses that boasts impressive graph layouts, customizable dashboards, and accessible and digestible data to share with team members.
Import.io - Import.io is a data visualization tool that works best for bigger operations looking for a good data extraction tool with features such as a scheduler, reporting tools, and an online datastore.
Salesforce - Salesforce is for businesses of all sizes and includes multiple features such as customizable dashboards, managing inventory, and data tracking and analytics to save your business time and effort.
Airtable - Airtable organizes project management all on an intuitive spreadsheet interface. It makes collaboration with your team easy with its real-time collaborative updates, multiple format options, and effortless data-syncing and sharing.
Personal productivity
As a PM, you have a ton of work and not a lot of time. Save time by managing your own to-do list and notes well with productivity tools.
Personals To-Do lists
Have a list of to-dos and want a way to manage them? These are good tools
ToDoist - ToDoist is a task management tool that increases productivity by organizing ideas and work. It allows you to plan your day, get reminders, add meetings quickly, and track habits.
2Do - 2DO offers a simple task-management platform with its smart lists, easy scheduling, data backup, and categorization.
Omnifocus - Omnifocus is a task management app compatible with Apple products for business professionals. It allows you to tag priorities, people, and places to stay on top of your projects.
Note-taking tool
Evernote - Evernote brings together information by allowing teams to create, edit, and collaborate on documents in one place. Evernote’s strengths lie in its convenience, users can edit files from any device, online or offline, and quickly find and store relevant information.
Notability - Notability creates organized and memorable notes with features like voice-recording tools, sketch tools, and multimedia note-taking. Notability allows for vast customization to note-taking and annotation making.
Team Project Management
Have to-dos to manage for a small team? Try these tools.
Monday - Monday is a project management platform where you can personalize your workflow, plan products, easily communicate with your team, and track progress all in one place.
Trello - Trello was built to manage work overflow by helping users manage projects and tasks on Trello boards and checklists. This visual tool fits with any type of team of any size.
Clubhouse.io - Clubhouse is a project management tool that is most compatible with mid-sized Agile software teams. It boasts a Kanban-style format that balances demands and capacity.
Podio - Podio is designed for product managers who want to organize and track projects. Its best features are its customizability and communication features that allow you to chat in real-time.
BaseCamp - Basecamp is a personal productivity tool that simplifies communication throughout your company with 6 core tools- a to-do tracker, a message board, a chat room, a calendar, files, and automated check-ins.
Pingboard - Pingboard is an organization chart for small to medium-sized businesses that keeps you up-to-date with company announcements and updates. It works great with remote workers with its face-to-name coworker features.
The options for your Product stack are endless, and new players are adding products every day. Your choices will depend on the size and complexity of your organization.
Here’s the stack I commonly use with clients to bring products to market.
As a mother and an entrepreneur, my mind fills with worry. This is a story about a structured story technique I use to manage worry.
It didn’t used to worry like this.
I remember that in my 20s I was much more carefree.
Healthcare is on the precipice of transformative change. While Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been making headway for some time now, a particularly promising subfield - Generative AI, also known as Large Language Models (LLMs), such as OpenAI's GPT-3 or its latest GPT-4, is beginning to leave a profound mark with deep implications for Healthcare. Product Management teams operating in healthcare can leverage these technologies to advance the industry.Healthcare product management is a subset of product management. And as such, there are general principles that guide useful application of Generative AI. Here we will review those first. Then hone in on healthcare more specifically.
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