Product Management Tools plethora? Pick the right one for your PMs

Jira portfolio vs AHA vs confluence vs others (Trello/Asana/Gitlab/Rally…)

Have you ever wondered:- Which one is the ideal Product Management tool from the plethora of product management tools in the market? Especially for company/group that is new to the Product Management Journey or is in early stages of growing the Product Management practice, this question becomes often important to resolve as soon as possible since it sets the base of your product management practice.

Picking the right tool for your product management practice is hard but important and goes a long way in making your practice and product managers (and hence your products) successful.

Here are my views/experiences on this topic and also a comprehensive analysis of Jira portfolio management versus AHA. I had the opportunity to use AHA when I was an offering manager at IBM extensively since that was the company wide tool used by Product Manager(AKA offering managers in IBM). At my current company, I got a chance to experiment with Jira Portfolio, structure boards, confluence, Asana, etc since AHA was not yet the official product management tool for the company. My analysis and summary are derived from these experiences.

In many companies where there is not a company-recommended designated product management tool, a combination of already available tools end up getting used for product management artifacts, needs, and use cases. Often the Confluence(wiki), Box and Jira Trio serves the purpose

I have also been curious about Gitlab’s portofolio management features https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/portfolio-management/ since that really can offer all teams to play in the same team since that is where the actual work is happening ( in source code management). It has the potential of aligning product managers, Project Managers, Engineering teams and users all in one place and save them all a lot of “tool-fatigue”. But for now they seem to be focused on Project management capabilities than Product management features and hence I see them as Jira (PPM) competitors rather than AHA’s competitors. I personally think they should look into Product Management user base and use cases as well, since it sort of aligns with their goal of “GitLab serving as a single application that does everything from planning to monitoring” they could go from “GitLab is a single application that does everything from Idea to monitoring” by incorporating the missing product management features.

Apart from Jira PPM and AHA( look for in-depth comparison at the end), our company is also looking into Agile Central and will update this chart if I see it as a strong contender.

Asana and Trello are another set of tools which are similar but I feel more geared towards project/task management that Product Management hence I did not include them in the comparison table but there are come pretty cool feature in both these tools that help with you workflows, stakeholder management and updates. You can do roadmapping in those as well.

Trello +Slack is personally my go-to tool for any kind of organization and coordination among teams since its free, easy to use, customize , flexible and intuitive for all types of users (tech/non-tech). I have used them to plan Hackathons, Meetups, Non-Profit volunteering activities etc multiple times, but most of these activities are focused around project/task management and keeping the whole team in sync rather than Product Management.

Two of the most interesting tools I have used in this space are Jira portfolio and AHA and I have used both of these in the past to be able to do a deep dive first-hand comparison of them. Hopefully sharing these experience will help you decide which tools work best for you. There are many other PM tools in the market as well but I have not included them due to lack of experience with them.

Here is an in-depth analysis of Jira Portfolio versus AHA comparison