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The Ultimate Product Management Toolkit
Product Management in itself is a broad term and the role of a “product manager” isn’t one that fits neatly into a box with predetermined spheres and responsibilities. The specifics of product management — prioritizing features, organizing requirements, creating and maintaining product roadmaps — are essentially diverse, but of utmost importance. Leading a product from conception to completion is no easy task — and product managers deserve their own toolkit.
Why do Great Product Teams need Product Management Tools?
If you are a product manager or aspiring to be one, you know just how important great tools are for planning and managing your team’s progress, as the crux of the product is.
The tools below will help you with everything, from the strategy of outlining your roadmap to the tactical side of building out your wireframes. They will also help you become a better resource for your cross-functional product team and hopefully ease the hard work of an already challenging job.
Product Roadmapping Tools
Create a visual product roadmap to outline your strategy, features, and ideas. You can prioritize features and user stories using the Aha! score to highlight business value. Crowd-source ideas from customers and employees alike, and integrate with dev tools like JIRA so engineering teams can build what matters.
Lets you capture ideas and feedback, create product specs, and build a product roadmap.
System of record for product management that helps teams make products people want.
Lets you plan and communicate your product roadmap.
Visual roadmap software for product management.
Project Management Tools
Project Management tools help track the project and organize the team's progress in a measurable manner. These tools have a Holistic UI which brings all the tasks and assigned teams together to keep and share records of short as well as long-term progress.
JIRA is issue tracking software produced by Atlassian. It offers deep integrations throughout the development and releases workflow. Track bugs, issues, and project management functions using one tool.
Think of Trello as your virtual whiteboard. This free, flexible tool helps you visualize projects at a high level. You can manage anything in Trello, from teams of contractors to upcoming events. Invite anyone to collaborate in Trello; To-Dos, comments, and drag-and-drop cards help everyone see who is working on what.
Asana is a web-based project management application that helps you work on the go from anywhere. Keep team conversations and tasks in one place rather than searching through emails.
A web-based project management and collaboration tool.
A lightweight project management tool for modern software development teams that love continuous delivery & simplicity.
Adds extra functionality on top of GitHub issues to help with project management.
A lightweight, agile project management tool for software teams.
Agile project management software for your whole team.
A work management and collaboration platform used by high-performance teams everywhere.
Product Research / User Research / Customer Feedback Tools
Create form and survey templates on any device. Increase engagement by presenting one form or question element using modern Web standards.
It helps you gather and organize customer feedback from various sources. Leveraging AI technology, it analyzes user feedback to provide you with valuable insights and identify customer issues. Additionally, it helps you map feedback with revenue impact to make informed product decisions. With Zeda.io, transform user feedback into revenue-generating products.
Create simple forms and surveys for free. You can even build forms from Google Drive or existing spreadsheets that record form responses for you.
Peek takes you into users’ minds in real-time. It is built for small businesses that need user testing at a fraction of the typical cost. See and hear a 5-minute video of a real person using your site or app.
Create and send sophisticated surveys to your target market. Choose from nearly 200 templates to build cloud-based surveys on any topic. Companies can also use SurveyMonkey’s enterprise services for brand management, data analysis, and consumer marketing.
Receive videos of your target market using any site or app. Ask any question you want and get results returned within an hour. Users earn $10 for every 20 minutes that they spend visiting websites, completing tasks, and speaking aloud about what they think.
UXCam is UX software that helps improve customer experience. Capture screen recordings and physical touch interactions on your app to learn what users struggle with through their eyes. Video recordings are captured automatically — so no extra lines of code are required.
Intercom is a customer platform with a suite of products for live chat, marketing, feedback, and support.
Alpha lets you input plain-English questions that on-demand research experts turn into prototypes, studies, and insights.
Wireframing/Specs Tools
A powerful wireframing and prototyping tool for websites and apps. Its software serves Web and desktop apps through drag-and-drop replacement, resizing, and formatting options.
Balsamiq is your computer on a whiteboard. Its rapid wireframing options help you quickly create mock-ups to share with clients.
An online wireframing tool that makes it easy to create, link, preview, and share mockups of any website or app. Drag and drop UI elements, link multiple mockups and collaborate with clients and colleagues in real-time.
A design platform for advanced wireframing and user experience. Use its drag-and-drop option to add UI elements to any mockup across Web, iPhone, and Android.
Prototyping and collaboration tool that lets you transform your files into interactive, sharable prototypes viewable on any device and get feedback.
An HTML5 app is used to create wireframes and mockups.
InVision allows you to collaborate, experiment, and test much more effectively and efficiently
Zeplin is the ultimate collaboration tool between designers and developers. It cuts meetings in half and ensures that designs are implemented perfectly,
however complex.
Principle makes it easy to design animated and interactive user interfaces. Whether you’re designing the flow of a multi-screen app, or new interactions and animations, Principle lets you create designs that look and feel amazing.
Metrics & Product Analytics Tools
The most comprehensive product analytics tool out there that lets you understand how your users behave along with tons of features meant for product teams of all shapes and sizes. They have a pretty generous free tier if you want to take the tool for a spin.
Find out where your users are clicking and scrolling — and why they leave your website. This heat map tool takes screenshots from specific URLs to collect all clicks on that page. You can track users on specific devices and compare mobile with desktop heat maps.
GoodData is a real-time analytics distribution platform. They use IaaS (Insights as a Service) to make interactive recommendations. Other features include the Data Explorer (to add approved data without needing IT) and the Insights Engine (AI that offers contextual platform solutions). Although, what needs to be kept in mind, is its pricing point which puts it in a bracket of ‘quality comes at a price.’
This free tool is the Internet’s most widely used analytics service. Discover where your traffic is coming from and what people are doing on your site.
Track, analyze, and optimize your digital marketing performance. See what’s working across all web and mobile campaigns. Track individual and group visitor behavior by seeing where your site loses visitors — and segmenting your high-growth traffic.
Mixpanel focuses on enterprise mobile analytics. Track engagement on your mobile site by measuring and tracking user actions — and having specific questions answered.
Perform simple A/B testing on any website using easy editing. Its latest feature — Optimizely Personalization — offers data connection, audience discovery, experience optimization, and impact understanding.
Qualaroo helps marketers find and utilize new opportunities to capture revenue. Its customizable solutions work across desktops, tablets, and mobile devices.
Segment is a hub that lets you collect, translate, and route customer data. All tracking code and advertising tags are converted to a single API. Send data from any device across any tool, and dispatch different data views to the teams that need them.
FullStory lets your company easily record, replay, search, and analyze each user’s actual experience with your website.
Product needs analytics. Marketing needs engagement. Growing Businesses need Both.
User Experience Tools
Don’t lead your users to boring blank pages. Empty States offers design templates for any user experience on any device.
GoodUI is an ongoing list of “good” user interface ideas with high conversion rates. It tests these ideas on your behalf using real consulting projects — and shares the results to let you know which ones truly work.
A full library of hand-picked mobile design patterns for every user experience. It works across several different devices, including iPad, Apple Watch, and Android.
Compare how other apps solve design problems. UX Archive is a library of mobile user experiences, screenshots, and animations for iOS apps.
Landing Pages tools
Instapage lets you build and A/B test landing pages in minutes. It integrates with more than 20 marketing tools, is mobile responsive, and lets you build custom layouts without writing code.
Create custom landing pages and tools to build your email subscriber lists. Design your own HTML5 templates for the webinar, sales lead, and contact pages. Then, receive custom analyses on your landing pages’ data.
Create your first marketing page with just a few clicks. Choose from more than 120 templates that are customized for whichever type of page you need. Each template is mobile responsive and integrates with 10 email providers.
No need for IT or software here. Unbounce lets marketers build, publish, and test their landing pages for A/B testing and lead generation.
Email Marketing Tools
Designed with small businesses in mind, Constant Contact helps teams create emails, grow their lists, and track successes. Users can access their online strategy library and seminars, as well as search for in-person neighborhood support.
Build instant emails with a few quick clicks. No need for templates or HTML — Goodbits lets you build newsletters for teams and customers within a few minutes.
There’s a reason MailChimp’s 7 million users send 10 billion emails each month. Manage contacts, send emails, and track results ranging from open rates to click-through rates. Subscriber profiles help you see high-level activity.
VerticalResponse is a suite of self-service marketing tools for small businesses. Create, send, and track emails and social posts that look great on every device.
E-mail marketing software that allows you to quickly segment your lists by subscriber opens or clicks, location, and even what pages subscribers visited on your website.
Combines CRM, email and social marketing, and e-commerce solutions. It is most known for it’s easy ability to segment subscribers by activity to help you send very targeted emails.
ContactOut is a simple browser extension that helps you find the email addresses and phone numbers of anyone on LinkedIn. Can be very effective for targeted cold emails.
Design & User Interface Tools
Create beautiful mockups for any device. Upload your UI designs and download high-resolution mockups.
Need a glyph vector icon? This database offers more than 16,000 of them. Added bonus: a Photoshop plugin that lets you insert icons directly into the artwork.
Turn your Web and mobile designs into interactive prototypes and mockups. Get gestures, transitions, and animations. And you can use LiveShare — Invision’s real-time whiteboarding tool — to collaborate.
Sketch is a powerful option for graphic designers who need the best. Quickly reuse elements using features such as Symbols and Shared Styles. And use features like extensive layer styles to create more complex shapes.
This Photoshop plugin serves as a library of subtle background patterns. All patterns sync automatically via their Photoshop extension.
The Noun Project is your marketplace of icons for anything and everything. It aggregates and catalogs symbols that are designed and uploaded by graphic designers all over the world.
Stock Photos & Videos Tools
Find and share royalty-free images under the Creative Commons license. Browse albums by subjects to find the most relevant images for your needs.
Sick of awful stock image options? Death to the Stock Photo sends a fresh pack of free photos to your inbox each month, with awesome stories to match.
Pexels offers free, high-quality stock photos that you can use anywhere. Use them for any commercial need without worrying about attribution.
Need images of startup folks at work? This royalty-free library is for you.
Unsplash delivers 10 new photos to download every 10 days. The high-resolution images are all free — and email subscribers can get every new batch sent to their inboxes.
Productivity Tools
Lets you take notes, track tasks, and save things you find online.
A task management platform for Mac, iPad, and iPhone.
A personal analytics service that shows you how you spend your time and provides tools to help you be more productive.
An online task management app and to-do list.
Collaboration Tools
Wiki tool to centralize your team’s product knowledge.
Launch an intranet for your company, a project site for your team, or a portal for customers with our site builder.1
Platform for team communication — everything in one place, instantly searchable, available wherever you go.
Rapid-fire meetings. Work together online, Online office space for everyone in your team, remote or not.
Prototyping Tools
A prototyping tool that lets you upload designs and add hotspots to transform your static screens into clickable, interactive prototypes complete with gestures, transitions, and animations.
Lets you create fully interactive high-fidelity prototypes that look and work exactly as your app should.
An easy-to-use, collaborative prototyping tool that helps teams visualize requirements with website wireframes and interactive software and mobile prototypes while working together in real-time.
If you are up for the rollercoaster ride that is product management, join our Slack Community: https://bit.ly/jointpf to network with PMs, hear about job postings and collaborate with product folks like you! Stay tuned for the next part in this series that focuses on building your Product Management resume.
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