Product Management is a blend of various responsibilities - business analysis, product designing, product management, leadership, marketing and sales. The final product is an outcome of the talent in the team and how the product manager fills the skill gaps in the existing organisation.
After having hundreds of conversations with various product managers, I have curated a list of tools that would help become an efficient product manager.
For collaboration
1. Confluence - Create, work and discuss work with your team
In a team you have documents, really important notes, designs, conversations, …… and so many other things all over the office that you need to share. Confluence is a tool that helps you organize all of this. You can create a single space for the entire team to collaborate on, or multiple space for each team in your organisation..
2. Slack - A messaging app for teams
It brings all your communication together in one place. The best part about the tool is that all the conversations are organised into channels, such as marketing, engineering, hiring, sales, random etc.. Anybody in the team can check what’s going on and participate in discussions. This definitely avoids a lot of miscommunication and confusions in the team.
3. tinyPM - tiny effort, proper management
It helps you with agile product management from vision to implementation. It is a lightweight and smart agile collaboration tool with product management, backlog, taskboard, user stories and wiki.
Product roadmap
1.Aha - roadmapping software for PMs who want their “mojo” back
It provides a SAAS Product Roadmap for Product Managers in software, Web, and technology. the Aha! platform provides a portfolio management framework for product strategy,requirements management, release management, idea capture, and visual roadmaps.
2. ProPad - for highly effective product teams
A product management software that supports the complete product journey. A smart, dynamic toolkit that integrates with your product development processes at every stage and supports collaboration from your entire business empowers product managers to turn great ideas into great products that customers love.
3. Product Plan - Create beautiful and easy roadmaps
It allows you to align the complete organization around the product strategy. Changing the product roadmap is something that is incredibly easy with Product Plan. It shows visually, what resources are where at a given time.
Productivity
1.Wunderlist - Keep your life in Sync
This tool allows you to tick off all your personal and professional to-dos. You can plan and share the list with people associated with it. Get reminders on set due dates so that you never skip a deadline. And of course, you can access this from anywhere on your mobile, mac, tablet or watch.
2. Rescue Time - Find your ideal work-life balance
I really loved going through this tool. It helps you understand your daily habits so that you can focus on being more productive. I am sure every product manager aims at achieving this! The software silently runs in the background of your computer and mobile devices. It tracks the time you are spending on apps and website, and then prepares a beautiful detailed report of your day.
3. Evernote - Remember Everything
Create a project to-do list. Jot down a reminder, or snap a picture of a sketch. It’s instantly available on all other devices. Share it all concerned people.
Analytics
1. Google Analytics - Turn insights into actions
It gives you insights on 3 things mainly - ABC - Acquisition, Behavior and Conversion. It provides data collection / management, data consolidation, data analytics, and reporting. In short, it gives you all the insights you need to improve your business.
2. Crazy Egg - Whats making your visitors leave?
It gives you the heatmap of your website. The Crazy Egg algorithms will analyze data from Google Analytics and your website to give you insights on how to improve your site. It gives you insights of how users click and scroll through your website.
3. Kissmetrics - Analytics built to optimize marketing
Marketers create messages, campaigns, and images to demand attention of the audience. Kissmetrics show you what’s working and what’s not working, across devices. They free the marketers from the conundrum of data management and analysis, because they handle that. It helps marketers to keep their focus on business strategies and customer interactions.
User research
1. Typeform - Goodbye forms. Welcome Typeforms
It is a form and survey builder that makes asking questions easy on any device. It helps you create a beautiful questionnaire which you could send out to users to know more about their feedback.
2. User testing - Unlock customer insights and increase your revenue
Gives you videos of real people speaking their thoughts as they use your product. It helps product managers like you, to get inside the heads of your target customers, watch what they do, and hear what they think.
3. CanvasFlip - Find and fix usability issues right from prototypes
Test early, test often! Gives you user experience insights on your prototypes in the form of session replays (watch what your user did on your prototype), conversion funnel (find out screens with maximum drop-offs in the flow) and interaction heat maps (figure out areas with maximum engagement and user attention).
Design
Sketch - Professional Digital design for Mac
A really easy to use design tool for designers. Currently only available on Mac.
Wireframe/mockups
1.Axure - Design the right solution and align your team
Axure is an interactive wireframe software and mockup tool. It is a desktop application that gives business and UX professionals diagramming, documentation, and interactive tools to quickly design and share interactive prototypes and specifications.
2. Balsamiq - Life’s too short for bad software!
Balsamiq mockups is a rapid wireframing tool that helps you work faster and smarter. It reproduces the experience of sketching on a whiteboard, but using a computer.
3. UXPin - Design is really about solving problems
UXPin lets you wireframe any user interface quickly and easily.
Prototyping
1. Invisionapp - Design better. Faster. Together.
A prototyping tool that lets you upload designs and add hotspots to transform your static screens into clickable, interactive prototypes complete with gestures, transitions, and animations.
2. Marvelapp - Simple design, prototyping and collaboration
Helps you create fully-interactive high-fidelity prototypes that look and work exactly like your app should.
3. CanvasFlip - Rapid Prototyping and find usability issues on prototypes ( no vanity intended! )
With CanvasFlip, you can prototype your ideas before you invest in them. Not a single line of code. A rich set of features including, gestures, transitions, layers, timer and many more to make high fidelity prototypes. The best part of the tool is usability testing on these prototypes in no extra efforts. Find and fix usability issues as early as possible in the design cycle.
Did I miss out on a great tool you have been using? Do let me know in the comments below.