Why I stopped trying to make PM tools work and rolled my own

I’m not unique in my desire to try all the new toys :) I read Product Hunt daily and try to check out anything that has to do with product/eng. I mean, after all, we’re product people, so naturally we want to check out the cool stuff people are building, right?

A few years ago, after many failed attempts to make various “product management” tools work for me, I gave up and went back to google docs and spreadsheets, which wasn’t ideal. People would break formulas or mess up the formatting (formatting is a huge pet peeve of mine). Each GDoc is independent, so you need to rely on naming conventions and drive folders to keep things organized and easily accessible. But at least docs were flexible and allowed me to do things my way.

Why PM tools didn’t work for me

I am very much a process guy. I believe that product’s product is process. We don’t design stuff or write code (well, some of us do, but you get the point). We create the processes and frameworks to best support our engineers and designers so they can ship the best products possible, taking into consideration an often daunting array of quant and qual data, business needs and opinions. We are like an API that connects the disparate functions of the organization. An API is simply a mechanism for things to communicate…