Lately, I’ve been working on gathering information on various applications for our product team so that they could use one to their heart’s content while still keeping in touch with the other departments constantly.
Of course, there are several other items that I’m checking, from the overall value we can get to the financial side of the business, to make a beneficial purchase for the better of the teams. However, I hate to admit that only a few applications get the passing grade as product management software.
In this article, I’ll tell you about an excellent tool that has topped the list I’ve made: monday.com as it’s considered one of the most comprehensive tools for product managers.
So, let’s start directing you toward a product management tool with advanced features on display for each and every product manager to see.
What Is monday.com?
monday.com is a project management tool that serves as a cloud-based Work OS (Operating System) where you get the liberty to visualize and put into action any work-related activity you perform in the office.
As work-related activities vary, monday.com offers a variety of tools so that you can manage and organize any activity on the online workboard it provides without any hassle.
From project to product, monday.com enables you to handle all your team’s work in one place, which doesn’t hesitate to help you fast-track your way to success by giving you the ropes to build and customize any tool that’s needed for you to pave the way for healthy and thriving team collaborations on the road to support the full product lifecycle from beginning to end.
The project management software that will actually work for your team
Manage simple to complex projects and everything in between with monday.com
monday.com Features
There are many things that you can achieve via using monday.com, thanks to its assistance in a wide range of use cases.
In essence, common features of this product management software solution are here to enhance the user journey and are directly related to customer satisfaction. For example, this platform creates an environment fit to:
👉 build a stable product roadmap,
👉 brainstorm and keep in touch with other departments via messaging,
👉 arrange meetings and take notes regarding important matters,
👉 give access and hide content from specific people
👉 comment on each other’s work,
👉 create various custom boards and templates,
👉 use automation for particular tasks,
👉 keep track of projects and assign workload, and
👉 integrate specific applications to gather information regarding important matters and data.
Let’s check a few of its main features in order to understand how capable it’s as a Work OS that aims to boost your teams’ performance and motivation by supplying you with a digital workspace, which is applicable to even complex workflows, especially for remote teams’ utilization.
#1 Design or modify your custom workflow
Being able to build simple blocks within the platform makes it easy for anyone to benefit from this Work OS since it doesn’t require coding at all—in most cases. The users are able to build blocks of items and columns, which are considered the main components of each board you make.
Items are the smallest individual lines that belong to a group; what they contain depends on you and the board you achieve to create.
On the other hand, columns are bigger components that specify the data you’ll put in there.
For example, project managers benefit from 17 different column types that monday.com provides when creating a board for project planning, such as the Status Column, as they’ll want to see the overall condition of the project as a part of the project tracking.
P.S. I already told you that monday.com was a comprehensive tool, but let me quickly and clearly state that these components are customizable dashboard widgets that you can arrange to your liking, whether width-wise, text-wise, or control-wise.
#2 Benefit from data visualization and analytics everywhere
As you get to create more workflows for your teams, you’ll see that monday.com supports various board views, which will generate an exclusive visualization dashboard that displays what is put on as information in the form of tables, charts, timelines, files, and many more.
With additional views in its Views Center, it aids the process management, which includes your advanced plans, by providing all the teams with its basic functionalities that visualize the workflow, thanks to the visualizing of tasks.
#3 Save more time by using automations
You might have a lot on your plate, from applicant tracking to completion tracking. However, automation is here to save you from your excessive workload. For repetitive tasks, this product roadmap planning tool offers complete tracking by triggers, conditions, and actions:
- A trigger is a reason that automation commences
- A condition is a unique standard that must be encountered for automation to be executed
- An action is the intended outcome of an automation
For example, each project team might utilize this feature by setting it as “When the status changes into Done, alert me” since completion tracking is one of the repeatable tasks they’re responsible for on a regular basis.
Having to check if everything’s going according to the plan, project managers would be alerted every time the status of a piece of work changes into Done from Working on it or Stuck.
#4 Work on everything on only one platform
Thanks to its integration options, there is a vast amount of collaboration tools that monday.com offers so that you can work on one platform that serves as a bridge.
Enabling you to implement the integration of data and several applications, it enhances the creation process of unlimited roadmaps since you can plan projects without having to consult another application in which you have data as you’re able to connect it to this platform without any problem.
The collaboration features big names such as Google Drive, HubSpot, Google Sheets, Slack, and Dropbox as critical resources to improve the optimization of workflow via the product deliverables these applications are to transfer.
How Can monday.com Help Product Teams and Product Managers?
This product management platform includes the key features to help product teams and product managers derive value.
Since product management teams have a wide variety of business objectives, monday.com provides them with the essential features below throughout the product management process:
- integration with crucial tools for product management, such as Google Analytics for in-depth analytics,
- product backlog templates for seamless product planning,
- in-app communication for idea management and valuable feedback, and
- unique templates to turn product design ideas into a new tool in your product stack.
(Plus, all the above can also be used by an agile team for the product development process to turn applicable ideas into reality with this product development tool.)
Here are the detailed examples of monday.com helping product managers and product teams by lending its assistance in product management:
1- Building a stable product roadmap for cross-functional teams
Including various product roadmap templates to choose from, the platform inspires both product managers and product teams to create a simple yet attractive roadmap which includes product decisions that are made with other teams to reinforce the product idea by allowing every member to collaborate and brainstorm on the very same platform at the same time.
Besides, it isn’t only the roadmaps; product managers will also store each plan, challenge, metric and KPI there.
Product managers and product teams get the chance to discuss product strategies and lay out the product vision by using customizable templates that can be modified according to the overall business strategy.
Also, product managers will be able to obtain advanced reporting regarding the color-coded and eye-catching roadmaps, which can be altered into any kind of form, thanks to the custom views.
2- Setting and tracking product projects
Every product manager knows that the process from product launch to product development takes time in many aspects.
Therefore, product managers need to generate some private boards in which only selected product team members will be able to work and public dashboards where they’ll need other departments to chime in with their ideas, suggestions, and feedback constantly.
Being able to create unlimited boards, you’ll be able to document and track projects regarding the product throughout the product lifecycle.
Thanks to its simple user interface, you’ll be granting access to private board sharing, assigning owners to custom workflows, benefiting from project management templates, updating the statuses of these projects, tracking the completion of tasks, and many more with ease.
3- Taking team collaboration to the next level
By offering various collaboration features, this product management tool serves as the activity/news feed that every department needs in order to create a product roadmap whiteboard altogether. For product management, there are tons of ways to take advantage of these features to improve the product development process.
For example, you might instantly message a team member about the comment you left on a task that was assigned to that member by you, or you might share a document on a meeting you planned on this platform with cross-functional teams on your mobile phone via iOS and Android apps of monday.com without hassle.
This feature makes it possible for the product team to gather information on the customer database and customer segmentation by consulting with the customer support team to prepare a plan concerning the feature requests of customers for the next meeting on product decisions which can be displayed as a section on the board views for every other team to reach.
4- Turning one template into another with ease
Without a doubt, product managers have meetings with a lot of people during the work days.
While the chair they sit on might stay the same, what they present definitely changes.
Therefore, they always have to be ready to provide the audience with advanced plans regarding the topic. This simple product roadmap tool is able to help you with that, too.
Whether you’re to introduce your custom workflow to a new member or present a detailed report on product vision to external stakeholders and business owners on an external board, you’ll be able to convert one form of data to another, which is one of the features that make this platform a great app for businesses.
You might be thinking that you would still have to make some changes in order to present one document to people outside your team, especially the stakeholders.
Worry not, ’cause monday.com has your back.
With advanced functionalities, as you can access controls, you’ll get to decide on what is shared with whom. This way, you can get to show project strategies while hiding sensitive information regarding the employees when presenting to an external audience.
5- Making perfect use of customer feedback via collaboration tools
As a product manager, what the customers say is crucial to be able to build a solid foundation throughout the product lifecycle. Therefore, customer feedback is one thing that needs to be paid attention to during product development.
As a result, monday.com puts importance on the integration actions so that you can access controls regarding collaboration features with which you can integrate any user feedback application to manage feedback collection.
6- Planning sprints to prioritize action items regarding feature additions
Even though here we mention monday.com as a poduct management software, one thing we cannot deny is that it shines as a project management software that enables the creation of creative projects, thanks to the powerful features of product management, such as automation, built-in reporting, and project scheduling.
Here let me mention something that project managers would love to hear: You can have UNLIMITED active projects on monday.com to take collaboration to another level between agile teams.
During each sprint, this cloud-based platform promotes real-time, live collaboration through features like chat and notifications so that each active project regarding your digital product gets to be discussed throughout the process of product ideation.
This way, product management teams can easily rely on product development teams throughout the product life-cycle to improve the user experience by delivering an improved product experience.
Plus, sprint management is a crucial item for prototyping tools to improve and generate more revenue by entering an agile software development process.
To ensure such triumph, this product roadmap software offers a long list of product management features from sprint task lists to daily tasks; the best thing is that users are able to benefit from task scheduling to prioritize what comes next in terms of importance.
So, you’ll be able to maximize the amount of efficiency a customer gets by using insights into customer experience, thanks to monday.com as your preferred tool that acts a single source of truth.
7- Aligning product vision and customer needs via analytics tools
The road that leads to becoming a lovable product in the eyes of your users depends on user experience (mostly).
Product stickiness, customer engagement, and customer retention are just some of the metrics that digital products need to track and boost no matter what to ensure both customer success and a healthy sales cycle.
And for the smart communication of raw ideas to be enabled between software development teams and product management teams, this advanced reporting and analytics tool provides you with real-time insights and control over users’ experience.
How?
By serving as a reliable product analytics platform that can store customer ratings, access to most popular product analytics, get a 360-degree view, observe customer behavior, and collect feedback from customers so that you can accelerate the process of execution for business growth.
Note that some user tracking features might call for integration with another business app.
Important Note: This article doesn’t cover the basic plan of monday.com; therefore, the features might differ according to the plan you choose. On another note, by signing up for monday.com’s 14-day free trial (let me mention that it’s a cardless trial), you can experience it without any limits.
In Conclusion
The product roadmap planning tool, monday.com, is able to deliver the needs of product managers and product teams seamlessly due to the advanced features it contains, such as advanced time tracking, configurable alerts, customizable branding, complete tracking over projects, automation against administrative tasks, bug tracking, and integration to third-party analytics and reporting tools.
So, if you want to jump on the ride with Hulu, Adobe, Unilever, and Uber to make use of monday.com’s product management features, here is the link that directs to pricing & plans.
Try it for 14 days and see how you can streamline complex processes with ease, even with the basic plan of this product road mapping tool!
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you use monday.com effectively?
Having the ability to create unlimited tasks, monday.com enables the users to have a unique kind of liberty in generating tools to fit their needs and fulfill their goals. By making the most of the basic functionalities it offers and increasing resource usage within the platform, you’ll be using monday.com effectively without limits.
Is monday.com similar to Jira?
monday.com is similar to Jira; however, there are some differences that need to be acknowledged. For example, Jira is an issue and project tracking software, while monday.com has many use cases, including bug and project tracking.
Can you use monday.com as a CRM?
monday.com can be used as a CRM (Customer Relationship Management), which will help you target leads, monitor the customer journey, and many more when going down that road. Also, there are a lot of user stories where monday.com is used as a CRM that you can find on its site.
