A product management role can include keeping in touch and working with many different departments at the same time.
Considering that the responsibilities can vary a lot depending on the needs of an organization and the skills of the product manager, the tool-stack of a PM will also show great changes.
In this article, we gathered the most fundamental tools and software that great product managers make use of while building great products that customers love. Here is the curated list of best software and tools for Product Managers to add to their stacks in 2021.
USER RESEARCH
User research is one of the most fundamental phases of a product or feature lifecycle, which requires a constant effort along the whole product journey.
With the help of the following tools, you can conduct user researches much needed to analyze your user’s problems, needs, and behaviors.
Intercom
Intercom is a perfect solution that embeds all user-related tools, such as chatboxes, email campaigns or help-articles to gather the valuable user insights you need.
Zendesk
Zendesk is also one of the most famous customer engagement platforms helping you solve, track, and prioritize customer support tickets.
EnjoyHQ
In addition, EnjoyHQ can help you gather all your data in one place, fasten your analysis process, and share information easily with your teammates.
Survey Tools
Moreover, the following survey tools can help you gather any information you need from your users as a tailor-made solution;
- Google Forms,
- JotForm,
- TypeForm,
- SurveyMonkey,
- Survey Anyplace.
One of our favorite solutions for collecting valuable customer information is monitoring live sessions of users while they’re using your platforms.
Fullstory and Hotjar are two amazing tools that can help you keep track of the user experience and create User Stories accordingly to tackle any UXWhat is UX? UX is the abbreviation of User Experience and refers to an individual’s thoughts and feelings when using a specific product or a service. It aims to heal… problems you encounter.
PRODUCT ADOPTION
Product adoptionWhat is product adoption? Product adoption is the process where an individual learns of a new product and becomes a user of it, learning what it does, how it does… refers to helping your users get acquainted with and used to your product. Mostly done in the most crucial part of a user’s journey; onboarding, product adoption is a key to growth.
UserGuiding
UserGuiding is a web-based digital adoptionWhat is Digital Adoption? Digital adoption is, in the simplest terms, achieving a state in which your employees and/or your customers are using a provided software, tool, or any other… software that helps you create great user onboardingWhat is user onboarding? User onboarding is the crucial process that starts from the first login of a new user and ends up in their aha moment, and usually beyond…. processes and turn your users into masters of your product in a matter of minutes.
And the fact that the tool is a %100 code-free makes it an irreplaceable addition to any product manager’s arsenal of tools.
DATA ANALYTICS
Your (product) intuition that you have developed over the years is your best companion when it comes to deciding in which direction the product is going to go, but, when it comes to validating those options, data is our best friend. Here are the best data management tools in the market that will help you with that.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is of course the first option that one will consider when it comes to tracking user analytics for free. With the help of GA, you can oversee your online traffic, conversions, and gather tailored user insights.
Mixpanel
If you would like to get serious with your data and go into more detail, however, Mixpanel will be your go-to option.
Optimizely
Optimizely is another great tool for product managers to build better products with the help of A/B tests and experimentation solutions like fast prototyping and in-depth feature tests.
PROJECT MANAGEMENT
Depending on how you run your software projects, Scrum or Kanban, you can (*) utilize many advanced task management tools out there to manage your projects and communicate your plans and progress with your teammates.
Jira
When it comes to Product Management, Atlassian’s Jira is the go-to option for many Product Managers, offering a flexible and scalable agile project management ability helping you plan, track and manage your tasks, stories, epics, and even bugs with ease.
Trello
Owned by Atlassian, Trello is another great project management tool that functions as a virtual bulletin board visualizing your progress on certain tasks depending on their status as pending, in progress, or finished.
As Jira fits better with Scrum methodology, Trello fits perfectly with Kanban practices.
Asana
You can also utilize Asana for Kanban, another great task management tool, which offers timeline modes, helping you keep track of progress from start to finish in a timely manner.
TEAM COMMUNICATION
Especially with the latest pandemic all over the world, companies of all sizes making a transformation to remote working, which raises the importance of centralized team communication even more.
Slack
Slack is surely the most prominent team collaboration hub where each department can create their own channels to discuss relevant issues, and help you create a great remote working environment with the help of countless integration options that Slack offers with other remote tools.
Zoom
Zoom is the latest leading video-based remote communication tool that facilitated immensely the remote meetings for both at the individual and organizational level.
Google Meet
Google meet is a great solution for remote communication since it is a web-based service not requiring any installments and all you need is pass on the meeting link to start any virtual meeting right away.
WIREFRAMING AND PROTOTYPING
Wireframing and prototyping have the utmost importance while communicating early-stage software development ideas. Developers will understand better what they’re building, designers will have something to work upon and content creation won’t have to wait until something tangible is ready.
Zeplin
As a great design-collaboration tool, Zeplin brings together the development and design teams.
As our favorite design stack tool is Zeplin in UserGuiding; Proto.io, Balsamic, and Sketch are other great wireframing and prototyping tools that PMs can make use of while giving shape to their early-stage ideas.
Miro & LucidChart
In addition, Miro and LucidChart offer highly intuitive web-based solutions for diagramming that you can utilize for visualizing your product strategy and align your team around it.
ROADMAPPING
Software for roadmapping is an indispensable tool in any PMs’ toolbox. Here are some of many roadmapping tools in the market facilitating this fundamental process.
Aha
Aha is a visual product road-mapping tool that will help you plan ahead your product strategy in ease and prioritize new features and tasks effectively.
Roadmap
Roadmap is another prominent roadmapping tool in the market helping product managers create visual and interactive roadmaps for a more effective communication and team alignment around software projects.
SOURCE CODE REPOSITORY AND DOCUMENTATION
Source code repositories help you safely store your product’s code in an organized way, collaborate on your source code, and guide you through the product development lifecycle.
Github
Github is the best-known remote code repository as the largest community for software development.
Bitbucket
Especially for the open-source community, Bitbucket constitutes a more flexible yet free-to-use alternative.
Confluence
Confluence is a collaboration wiki tool from Atlassian that helps product managers collaborate and share information assets around their projects. Being ready at hand to be easily integrated with Jira, Confluence is the go-to option for product teams running on agile principles.
Doesn’t end here…
These are only the tools that I and the product team adopt/have adopted in the past at UserGuiding. You can get started with this list but there are certainly many alternatives and countless other solutions that you can try and achieve value with.
Product School, which is a product managerWhat is a product manager? A product manager is the person who’s job is to ensure a product’s overall success and leads the teams related to the product. This title… training platform, has recently created an interactive visualization of product management tools that doesn’t just offer a wide variety of options but is also fun to use. It’s called “Productverse” and you can access it here.
Frequently Asked Questions
😎 Who is a Product Manager?
A Product Manager is someone who is job is to manage every aspect of the product from development to customer service, ensuring the product’s success.
❓What are the responsibilities of a product manager?
A product manager should ensure the communication between every team related to the product in order to make the product market-ready and pain-point free.
🔧 What type of tools should a product manager use?
User research, product adoption, analytics, project management, team communication, and roadmapping tools are the most popular type of tools among product managers.
