8 Product Management Tools To Transform Your Workflow

Effective product management is crucial for the success of any organization.

Utilizing the right tools can significantly transform your product management workflow.

Let's face it; product management may be complex. Getting caught up in the hustle, bustle, and stress of product management and interacting with numerous teams, scheduling releases, prioritizing customer satisfaction, guiding the mobile product plan, and countless other tasks is not simple. It's not easy to guide a project from inception to completion. It would help if you had your toolset as a product manager to assist you in carrying out all the tasks required to bring a product to market.

It involves developing and sharing plans, constructing prototypes, assisting with customer onboarding, observing user behavior, and getting feedback from customers. A variety of capabilities are available in product management software to help organize and carry out product planning. A product team's progress is continuously tracked by roadmap features, enabling timeline modifications and breaking down a workflow from ideation to product launch.

Things will be easier with a fantastic staff, improved management, and an excellent product. However, you can't pick them. At all times, you will be joining operations that already have issues and difficulties. Nevertheless, you can opt to use the most excellent product management tools and software. A decent rule of thumb is to select the fewest number of tools necessary to suit your team's needs.

What is Product Management?

So let's deal with the fundamentals before we get deep into the product management tools. We don't have a response that is accepted by everyone when asked, "What is product management?" Specialists in the field of product management ask this question as well. It's a crucial position at the core of an organization where you must balance what your customers want and what is technically and operationally feasible while still delivering value to your business.

Product management strategically directs the creation, introduction to the market, ongoing maintenance, and enhancement of a company's products. Today, "product management" refers to a position within a product development team dedicated to successfully carrying out the product lifecycle.

A deep understanding of clients and the capacity to develop solutions specifically for them are more important than ever in the digital industry, where newer and better alternatives swiftly replace firmly established items. Product management can help with it.

Product management is an important strategic task. Giving product managers the responsibility of figuring out the "Why" of a product. Product management includes a wide range of continuous strategic duties. Typically, product managers are in charge of implementing the following product management principles:

1. Pitching and positioning fresh concepts for the development of products and features.

2. Assisting design and engineering teams in bringing the product to reality.

3. Meeting the needs of the intended user or client with each product.

Product Manager's Roles and Responsibilities

But generally speaking, an innovative product manager will focus on a small number of duties. Ensuring that the product supports the organization's broader strategy and goals is crucial to the product manager's job. The product manager's responsibility is to deliver a unique product to the market that fills a market need and offers a promising economic opportunity.

Product managers excel in uniting teams around a common knowledge of customer problems and how the team will address them. They are product leaders within their enterprises. Additionally, job duties for product managers frequently differ between organizations, and at first glance, it appears that no two product manager positions are the same.

Be Open and Honest About your Roadmap and Prioritize Your Approach

Remember that a large part of your job as a product manager will involve articulating the "why" to various stakeholders and customers. Why one feature or theme is more important than another in a release; why is one goal more important than another? Always be up-forward and transparent about the factors influencing your actions.

Setting a plan

Setting the vision and strategic direction for your product is your primary responsibility. So that your team is aware of why you are developing a specific program or feature, you must be able to explain its business case concisely. Laying out key investment areas allows you to prioritize what matters most and accomplish your product goals. You are also responsible for the product roadmap, a schedule that shows what and when you will deliver.

Speak with Clients

It will help if you give considerable time to your customers to realize that what your team is doing is essential for them, whether in person or through other channels like customer service tickets, phone, or video conferencing. You can plan new features with the aid of time spent with customers.

Juggle the Demands of Stakeholders and Customers

No matter how big or how much money your business has, you will never have enough resources to produce a new product. As a result, you will always need to prioritize and balance the competing demands from numerous stakeholders, your company's limited resources, and your products. Several excellent approaches, such as weighted scoring and the Kano model, might help you get started if you're dicey about how to set priorities or weigh different elements when designing your roadmap.

Creating detailed specifications
As a product manager, it is your responsibility to develop comprehensive specifications for new features and goods. This involves incorporating business objectives, user stories, product requirements, and customer context into your specifications. In addition, you will be in charge of creating wireframes and user journeys that align with the desired user experience. Collaboration is key, as you will iteratively discuss and refine your specifications with the development team. By actively seeking feedback from the engineering team, product team, and customers, you can continuously improve and fine-tune your specifications until they are deemed construction-ready.

Establish Releases

Product managers turn product strategy into pre-planned work by deciding what to produce and when to release it. No matter what development technique your engineering team use, this is true. All of the tasks necessary to introduce new goods, features, and functionalities to the market fall under your purview, and you are in charge of managing the release process and cross-functional dependencies. Bridging organizational gaps across several departments and synchronizing crucial teams like marketing, sales, and customer service.

Why Product Management Tools?

Product managers require support to deal with such burdensome obligations. The various available product management tools will undoubtedly contribute to this assistance. Software programs known as "product management tools" assist product teams in carrying out part or all stages of the product lifecycle, from planning, researching, and designing a product to launching, evaluating, and iterating on it. When discussing tools for product managers, we frequently speak to the primary handful that most product managers utilize daily. These product management solutions often comprise software for road mapping, development tracking, and product analytics. 

Prototyping, creating a product roadmap, user journey mapping, customer research, product road mapping, feature prioritization, managing sprints, analyzing product data, process mapping, and managing product releases. Product teams use product management tools for all examples of product-related tasks. But gathering product insight, monitoring the backlog, and analyzing the product roadmap are only a few of a product manager's duties. Whether you're a novice product manager or an experienced PM, you should check to ensure you don't overlook a crucial aspect of your job because you don't have the right tool.

Here are 8 product management tools available today:

1. Chisellabs

Every product manager needs a great tool now that remote and hybrid work is firmly present as the new standard. Chisel's goal is to aid you in creating fantastic items. To develop outstanding things, Chisel thinks it's crucial to construct the appropriate product at the proper time, align the team, and develop a robust connection with your customer. You can create flexible, agile product roadmaps with Chisel to accommodate your team's particular prioritizing system and deliver the correct product when needed.

The biggest workplace productivity killer is team misalignment. To create a collaborative prioritization approach based on scores, Chisel devised the alignment matrix. Chisel offers a unified platform to support the several facets of product management. However, the best thing is something other tools can't accomplish.

2. ProductPlan

ProductPlan is a road mapping and collaboration tool in one. With this helpful product management tool, you can freely switch between the timeline, list, and table views while creating and sharing an unlimited number of roadmaps. ProductPlan has a "comments and mentions" tool that lets you tag coworkers, make status updates, and ask questions on the platform. The Basic plan's price starts at $39 per editor per month.

3. Miro

PMs invest significant time in strategic work, using tables, flowcharts, and mind maps to analyze and determine what to do. They are all often used by both individuals and teams. Miro is a fantastic visual collaboration tool if you know how to use a whiteboard for product management.

The most seasoned product leads to knowing which visual frameworks best handle the issue. Miro includes well-liked templates for scrum meetings and group projects. Three boards are free, limitless panels cost $8 per member per month, and premium features cost $16 per month.

4. monday.com

Teams of all sizes may plan, track, and manage their daily tasks using the online product management platform monday.com. From weekly iterations to broad product roadmaps, monday.com assists teams in defining clear ownership, tracking and analyzing their work, managing sprints, and collaborating.

Teams can collaborate online with ease thanks to the agile platform from monday.com. To ensure teams always have access to information, monday.com provides 24/7 assistance, taped webinars and seminars, and comprehensive knowledge base articles. monday.com's pricing is $17 for two customers each month. A 14-day free trial of the product is available.

5. ProdPad

The leading platform for product management is ProdPad. And this might be true given the wide range of features and functions available. So what is the actual purpose of ProdPad? Lean road mapping, idea discovery and management, and customer feedback management are the three main pillars of the ProdPad platform.

ProdPad is a strong contender if you seek a complete, adaptable road-mapping solution. Just the roadmaps feature is available for $20/editor/month, or you may choose to subscribe to all three modules for $60/editor/month.

6. Pitch

Any product manager must be able to present well. Project managers frequently struggle with influencing without formal power. Product managers rarely have direct reports but must steer numerous teams toward varied goals. They must continually persuade stakeholders to support them through clear, visual communication. You may communicate your idea more effectively with a decent pitch deck template, but you must first be an excellent storyteller.

Pitch is ideal for product leads who want to make stunning, branded slide presentations quickly and easily. Unlimited file size uploads and premium features are $9 per month.

7. airfocus

The first and only modular product management platform on the market, airfocus, is designed exclusively for product teams to manage internal products, external goods, IT portfolios, and more. The adaptable platform assists product teams in driving strategy, comprehending consumer needs, prioritizing, and bringing their teams together around well-defined roadmaps.

airfocus is unique in that it allows consumers to add their configurable scoring criteria to score and rank each project and feature of your product. Product management teams struggling with reliable priority rankings would benefit from this feature. airfocus offers a 14-day free trial and monthly prices starting at $15. 

8. Trello

Trello is one of the more robust project management applications that aim to improve teamwork within and between departments. Trello allows you to manage numerous projects and arrange various activities by allowing you to create boards, lists, and cards. You may also set up calendars, make checklists, and assign productivity indicators to get a clear picture of everything happening.

Trello is essential to your product management stack because the product manager's job involves coordinating various moving elements. Trello has built-in automation for the best processes and the least amount of manual effort, like many other top products today. Pricing for Trello plans ranges from nothing to $17.50 per user per month.

Summing up

You can ensure ideal processes, easy collaboration, and a data-driven approach to creating products your people will love by including the appropriate technologies in your tool stack. With the appropriate tools, you can also fully utilize your product management expertise to create unique products that benefit your consumers. Discovering the right tool stack for you generally takes trial and error, so don't hesitate to try different things.