One way to define product management is as “a complete pipeline for formulating strategy for a product, ensuring its timely development, and successfully deploying it in the market, throughout the product's life cycle.”
Or, to put it another way, product management is “the overlap between building the right product and building the product right”.
In a software development organization, the person in charge (the product manager) is accountable for overseeing the product at its different stages, including formulating product strategy (analytics, research, and conceptualization), developing a roadmap (a product plan) for ensuring timely implementation, and launching the product to market to meet defined financial and marketing goals. The PM is responsible for facilitating teamwork and handling technical challenges that occur at different levels throughout the development workflow.
An ideal approach is to assemble a great team with the vision to create the best product under the influence of strong management. But this ideal situation cannot always be achieved.
For this reason, choosing a tool or application that enables efficient product management is the best way to ensure success. Below is a list of product management tools that can help you deliver a quality product on time.
Product management tools play a crucial role in delivering a requirement-driven final product. The tools handle logging of strategies, product vision, in-and-out department communications, data analysis, road mapping, resource allocation and many more challenges inherent to building a final product.
Before listing the best product management tools, it's useful to consider which functionalities your product management tool should include.
To narrow down your options, be sure to ask questions relevant to your process. For instance: What is the makeup of the team that will use these tools? This is key because different tools have different usage levels based upon the type of end user. Schedule a meeting to ask your team members what kind of tool provides a user-friendly interface for them.
After getting an opinion from the team, you can select one of the options below.
One fundamental step in product management is to construct a visual plan containing the strategy for build the product and its initial concepts. The ideas and requirements can come from end users and from team members. A popular tool used for roadmapping is Aha!.
Aha! claims to have 250,000 worldwide users and is a strong tool for data-led planning. Productboard, Roadmunk, and Monday are also easy-to-use tools in this category.
Tracking is a key feature of any iteration of product development. Jira is a popular tool that can be used to track bugs, flaws, and issues throughout the whole development process. It shows the bug visually and lets team members plan strategies to get back on track. Jira can also be used in the road mapping category depending upon the skill set of your team. It also comes with mobile interface to be managed on a device anywhere.
A web-based tool, Trello, is also used for tracking and comes with easy-to-view boards to show certain data to all team members.
To analyze user feedback and identify user behavior towards a product, you need to conduct a quick survey or brief research. Therefore, collecting user responses is necessary in order to detect hollow parts of your product that need to be corrected for a positive user experience.
“When customers love your product, they become ambassadors.”
– Tom Padula (Senior Product Manager at SiriusXM)
Free surveys can be conducted using Google Forms or SurveyMonkey. Multiple formatting options and built-in features makes these tools easy to use. You can also go with the following options:
Developers can also record online feedback and experiences of customers on call by using Zoom or GoToMeeting.
Data is central to any discussion of product management. Without data analytics, a product management tool is of no use. The tool Airtable is commonly used to organize data in a spreadsheet format, although its utility for workflow management is limited by its lack of user interface tools.
Asana is another popular tool which is suitable for both small and large-scale business/enterprises.
Moreover, Google Analytics is the most popular and handy tool to view an online summary of what your users are viewing and thus provide metrics that help in making strong product decisions.
To keep your team up-to-date and communicating in a centralized place, you can get great results with a cloud-based tool like Slack.
For high-end presentations, the tools which should fill up your stack of product management tools are: Prezi, PowerPoint, Google Slides and Keynote (works for Mac). Custom presentations with professional themes are a great way to convey important details to your stakeholders and engage external customers.
One flowchart maker tool used for presentation purposes is Visio. Visio provides the ability for all team members to work at a same time on a project diagram by using Microsoft 365.
Visio is especially useful for creating diagrams or visual charts that map the “Customer Experience Journey.” This is because it provides modern templates and shapes to illustrate how a customer visits your company's website, interacts with your sales team, and ends up buying the product. You can also connect your diagram to real-time data to make changes in shapes and charts whenever the connected data changes.
"Analytics" refers to real-time tracking tools that give you an idea about what your product is serving to end users and what needs to be modified to have a better marketing approach. For example, Optimizely allows you to test your product (as long as it is a software product). It allows both A/B and multi-variable testing to optimize the product.
Segment also falls under this category, as it helps to collect each customer’s real-time access data and dispatch it to every team member in a complete toolkit. It gathers user events from both mobile and web applications.
For modern businesses, “Dynamic Feature Inclusion” provides feature management for a product. It allows the development team to release new features or remove problematic features from code when they have been deployed.
Split and LaunchDarkly enable teams to infuse and test feature flags in their production environment without affecting or involving end user engagement.
Before selecting a product management tool, define your weak points and your business transformation methodologies. Investing in these tools can do wonders for engineering, production, implementation, and communication during product development.
Apart from product managers, teams also play a critical role in development. Strong teams do things more quickly, practice proper time management, work smart, and stay organized. Productivity applications are useful ways to see for yourself that more productivity means more profit and greater efficiency.
Here are a few "must-have" productivity tools for the daily workflow of development teams in the year 2020.
The above-mentioned applications cover your business's “to-do-list,” ”organization,” “time tracking,” “communication,” and “presentation” needs.
You might wonder where Crowdbotics falls on the above list. While not strictly a product management tool, Crowdbotics is a self-serve app builder that automates, abstracts, and reproduces many of these product management features within a single platform.
Product teams can storyboard user flows, lay out custom UIs, track and assign tasks, and access the application's admin panel directly within the Crowdbotics platform.
Designers can implement their designs directly within the app using a drag-and-drop interface for various screen sizes. They can also view and test a live demo of their app within the Crowdbotics dashboard.
Developers can rapidly assemble underlying data models, generate self-documenting arbitrary APIs, and deploy to a live URL with a single click. A two-way integration with GitHub and integrated IDE (coming soon) makes it easy to perfect their app's performance with custom code.
The all-in-one nature of the Crowdbotics platform represents a completely new approach to software development that is faster, cheaper, and more modern than conventional approaches.
Do you need an easier, faster way to build apps? Get in touch with Crowdbotics today.
The right PM tool for you depends on the size of your team and business, the nature of your product, and the scope of budget allocated for the product. Considering your present and future needs and identifying how a tool can increase your product’s productivity and reduce your workload. By stating requirements carefully, conducting stakeholder meetings, and formulating surveys, you can answer most of your developer's needs with only a few great tools.
Allah-Nawaz Qadir
Originally published:
August 25, 2020
