Product backlog — 5 tools to organize your roadmap

In this post, I want to share with you 5 tools that I tested, some more than others, as a product manager to organize my roadmap or backlog.

In my view this is one of the main skills that everyone who works with management should have. In my case, this point has an extra weight because I work with different countries and timezones, and sometimes the stakeholders need to see the status by their own to get some update.

This topic is useful for every product manager, but in special for PM´s that are working with remote teams.

I hope you enjoy the reading.

Check it out:

1. Asana

review title: Good balance between simple and complete

It’s a good tool to track progress, add team members to collaborate on the project, add extra docs (ex. layouts, research presentation etc)

You can see your task per
a. status — eg. to do, wip, done;
b. date through a calendar or
c. initiative — eg. conversion rate, engagement etc..

Inside the tasks, the team members can add comments about the progress.

Price: has a free plan limited to 15 team members and a paid plan for 15+ members and have additional features.

more infos here — www.asana.com
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2. Trello

review title: Simple and Easy

This tool is best for organizing everything in your professional or personal life (Also, i’m using to organize my wedding party, rs)

Is simple, easy to manage to share with everyone.
The stakeholders need to create an account to see the task’s status.

Trello has fewer features than Asana, but that doesn´t means it is worst.

Price: It is free.

more infos here: www.trello.com

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3. Aha

review title: The most complete tool for product managers

This is a complete tool for product managers and project management.

Beyond to adding tasks and manage the backlog there, you can add the vision, strategy, and create a complete documentation about the product to link with the stories.

You can create a blog to receive ideas and build an idea parking lot.
Then everyone can vote in the ideas and see their status.

The system generates reports and you can send them by email to every stakeholder automatically.

On the other side, This tool has a little bit of complexity to manage and configure at first.

Price: It’s paid, but you have a trial period to test.

more infos here: www.aha.io
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4. Google Drive spreadsheet

review title: The old product manager style now in the cloud. s2

This is not exactly a tool to manager products neither backlog but you can do it.

Google Drive is good because you can share easily, the stakeholder doesn’t need a specific account to check the status.

Everyone can manager the same document and has a change control of update.

Price: It’s free

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5. Jira

review title: Good for developers

This tool is super complete and hard to use, in my view is more useful for developers than product managers.

There you can do everything that the others tools also does, that I mentioned here before plus see the team performance and technical effort.

For technical teams is the best one.

more infos here: br.atlassian.com/software/jira
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Conclusion:

For me a good tool should be:
‘- Easy to manage and organize the epics or stories;
‘- Possible to add team members to collaborate;
‘- Easy way to share the product status between the stakeholders;

And for you?

Hope I have helped you!

Cheers,

Fernanda