7 Product Management Software tailor made for your needs
List of Best Product Management Tools
Product Management is believed to be a cocktail of responsibilities spanning across functions like business analysis, product design, project management, negotiation, leadership, marketing and sales. The scale of activities performed by Product Managers depends upon how the Product Management function has evolved in the organization and the scale of communication gap existing in the organization between Engineering and Marketing. However, any Product Manager should own a few important activities, in addition to all other responsibilities, like product research (idea, market, competition), road map, articulation of the idea, driving the vision for the product, & Iterating/Repeating the above.
Personally I have been in search of tools to help me work with at-most efficiency, as a Product Manager. Here I am sharing with you some of my finds and before that, here is the checklist I used to qualify a Product Management tool.
- Build and Manage a vision for my product
- Roadmap tool with the capability to manage ideas and feedback.
- Manage goals, epics, features and requirements and overall priorities
- Engage with stakeholders through handy reports and analytics
- Work with milestones and collaborate with different teams
- Integration with project management/feature tracking tools and other supporting software
- Interactive design
- Value for money
(Stealth/Enterprise product managers might have stringent security requirements too! But I am happy with a standard SSO or email based login.)
Aha.io allows you to manage product vision, goals, product roadmap, timelines, requirements, generate reports and share all the information with stakeholders. In a way the product offers a holistic solution for product managers even though the interface looks a little crowded and overwhelming for someone to start using it. On the plus side it offers integration with Jira, Github, VSO and also the web hooks. The pricing plans start from as low as $59/user/month and it also offers a 30 day free trial.
The product touted to be a strategic communication tool that drives the vision for the product, pretty much covers all the requirements mentioned above. It is quite exhaustive, offering a way to visualize the roadmap, collaborate with teams and manage features, feedback and their priorities. On the down side its interface is pretty overwhelming and I am not able to keep my focus on the tasks. Also workflows get pretty complex at times. It’s priced per user and with higher plans you get features like persona management, roadmap management and integrations. $39/month plan is where it starts and $299/month plan seems to be the feature rich plan.
ProdThink is primarily used to capture and centralize feedback on product features. You can collect in-app feedback from users, on your new/existing features. Also you can share the roadmap with stakeholders to get their vote and measure interest levels. The pricing varies depending upon the number of admin licenses required and screen recordings you would want to perform.
Validately is a great product for ideas and market validation and a good usability testing tool for Product Managers. This eliminates the need for product organizations to develop a feature or MVP to test it out with customers or prospects. It allows one to do that just with high fidelity mockups. There is a free trial plan to start with and you can choose from one of their paid plans ranging between $49 to $249 per month. Validately also comes with InVision and Axureshare integration. If your requirement is only related to your idea or feature validation and usability analysis this is a great tool!
ProductPlan is positioned as a Roadmap and communication tool with features to help you build roadmap with timelines and themes represented visually, plan your tasks in a detailed manner, present it to your team in easily comprehendible format and collaborate with your team in incorporating feedback. They offer a unique pricing model which offers discounted pricing for teams of sizes 4–10 and above 10. They also work with some great brands including Paypal, Adobe and Constant Contact which serve as a testimony to the quality and reliability of the product.
InnovateNow (Used to be called Uberito) positions itself as an innovation tool. It has some key capabilities essential for Product Management, including, the ability to manage roadmap, ideas, features, backlogs, timelines etc. The pricing of the product is not available yet on their website. The product being in its nascent stage needs to strengthen the in-app UX, performance, integration with some famous Project Management tools and solid business metrics on KPIs.
Wizeline proclaims to be a full stack product design and development tool with features to build goal driven product strategy, data driven product roadmap and ability to track progress of development with a timeline view. It’s features include capabilities for idea management, backlog management, product surveys and feature prioritization. They offer a 14 day free trial while subscription price begins at $49/month/user for Basic features, $99 for integrations and dashboard and $159 for customizations and priority support.
I am sure the list would grow with more products and capabilities. The existing list of products offer a great market validation that a Product Manager’s workflows are standard and organizations are willing to streamline and unify the whole process.
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