75 Product Management Tools Used by London Pros
As Product Managers we’re always trying new and shiny tools to help us do our jobs. So when Mind The Product kicked off its first ProductCamp in London on the weekend, I took the opportunity to try and distill what tools worked best by crowdsourcing from London’s PM community.
The event was an ‘unconference’, so there was no initial plan — the idea had to be hatched and formed between morning coffee and the 2pm slot I’d chosen to host the presentation. But I had no presentation. My laptop was at home. What I did have was butcher paper, pens, Post-it notes and free-flowing caffeine. Bingo.
Playbook
I figured the tools we use could be broken down into 5 categories:
- Customer Development
- Prototyping / Wireframing
- Roadmapping / Project Management
- Analytics / User Testing
- Learning / Inspiration
Attendees would post their favourite tools in each category, discuss/debate their merits and then we’d tally the winners. The most popular picks from each category would then go on to become #PCampLDN’s “Ultimate Product Management Toolkit” for 2015.
Here’s how it went down…
Customer Development
The Winner: Get out of the building and interview your customers in-person
The Challenger: none
The Contenders:
- Typeform
- Running Lean (book by Ash Maurya)
- Empathy maps
- The Mom Test (book by Rob Fitzpatrick)
- Business Model Canvas
- Non-product experiments (concierge)
- Story telling
- Intercom.io
Prototyping / Wireframing
The Winner: Pen and paper
The Challenger: Balsamiq
The Contenders:
- Sketch
- Photoshop
- Google Presentation
- Keynote
- Powerpoint
- Axure
- POP (Prototyping On Paper) app
- Marvel
- Invision
- Framer JS
- Paint
- Any picture editor
- Notable
Roadmapping / Project Management
The Winner: Trello
The Challenger: Jira Agile and Post-it Notes (Kanban)
The Contenders:
- Target Process
- Team Gantt
- Google Docs
- Google Spreadsheets
- Tom’s Planner
- Basecamp
- Kantree
- PivotalTracker
- ProdPad
- Asana
- KanbanFlow
- Slack
- AHP (Analytical Hierarchy Process)
- GitHub
Analytics / User Testing
The Winner: Google Analytics
The Challengers: Mixpanel and Omniture
The Contenders:
- Chartbeat
- Spaceman Merchandiser
- Inhouse database
- Silverback
- User testing videos
- Flurry
- Splunk
- Crazy Egg
- Jotjar
- Hitwise
- Optimizely
Learning / Inspiration
The Winner: Mind The Product
The Challengers: none
The Contenders:
- Product Development Flow (book by Donald Reinertsen)
- Black Swan Farming (post by Paul Graham)
- RSS
- Apps World (conference)
- UX London
- Scrum Alliance
- Twitter (following product people)
- A List Apart
- Roman Pichler
- ThoughtWorks blog
- Fast Company
- Digiday
- Marty Cagan — SVPG
- Product Hunt
- General Assembly
- The Mobile Academy
- Lean Startup (book by Eric Ries)
- Feedly Medium
And the “Ultimate Product Management Toolkit”?
Time (or my lack of timekeeping) unfortunately got the better of us and the session ended before we could post the winners on the “Ultimate Toolkit” board. On the face of it, we could say that in-person interviews, pen & paper, Trello, Google Analytics and Mind The Product took out the ‘best-of-the-best’ prize, but that seems too narrow. Including the challengers in that list might get us closer. But again I think we’d be selling ourselves short, because the chosen categories were far from perfect and many tools work in unison with others, which made it hard to tally votes.
Trello vs. Jira Agile
We saw some some passionate advocacy for Trello vs. Jira Agile. It dominated the Roadmapping / Project Management discussion — no other category generated a head-to-head debate like this one did, which basically boiled down to the simplicity of Trello vs. the feature-richness of Jira Agile. Post-it note / paper kanban methods also made a strong showing for those who preferred to work outside any technical paradigms.
Wrap up and thanks
In the end we ended up with 75 tools, resources and methods used by London’s product community. I look back and partly wish I’d prepped the session beforehand. But a little bit of scrappiness didn’t seem to hurt, plus we got 13 votes for best session! Perhaps all that really counts is that we bounced ideas, met some new people and learned a few things along the way.
Big shout out to the tweeters who helped lead discussion and snapped the results (without which I couldn’t have shared this post): @basiafusinska @ueshiba @tvnweb @AlejaDC @depopmarket and @simplybastow — if I’ve missed anyone please add yourself to in the comments.
David Bushby is Chief Operating Office at Lexoo — a legal services marketplace that helps startups and small businesses get multiple quotes from specialised lawyers. He tweets @davidbushby, connects on LinkedIn and creates @LawHackers
