According to Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, 30,000 new consumer products are launched each year, and among those, too many fail. Part of the reason is the lack of integrity in the product management tools. Hence, an effective product management tool is required to ensure the product’s overall success. Today, we have gathered a list of the five best product management tools to improve the efficiency of product managers.
A product manager, who has to coordinate and supervise a whole team, often possess an arsenal of various product management tools- ranging from the most basic to the most complex ones. These sorts of tools are used for tasks such as roadmapping, flowcharting, analyzing, tracking, managing, collaborating, integrating, and so on. With so many product management tools available, it is often difficult to identify the ones that are actually useful, save your resources, and offer you conveniences. The following product management tools are currently the best ones you will find in the market. Let’s see what they offer.
1. Roadmunk
Roadmunk is a very popular product management tool, used by industry giants like Microsoft, Dell, and Mcdonald’s. It aligns your organization or project to a customer-driven roadmap. Many successful product managers swear by this product management tool because it’s beneficial for visualizing product strategy. Roadmunk’s user interface is also highly intuitive, and product managers can easily capture customer feedback, prioritize what to do next, and design excellent product roadmaps to communicate their strategy. Moreover, it comes with ample roadmap templates to get started quickly.
However, you can also create your own roadmap template from scratch. There are two different views to visualize your strategy. You can either commit to dates with a Timeline Roadmap or keep things flexible with Swimlane Roadmap. Besides that, you can also use the Format Tab to structure your roadmap or add color to different fields. Additionally, this product management tool integrates natively with Jira and offers a Roadmunk API to sync your data with the tools your team already uses. In terms of plans and pricing, Roadmunk comes with four pricing options, and all the plans start with a free 14-day trial. This is excellent as you can try out the tool before committing to any plan.
2. Productboard
Used by the likes of Zendesk, Avast, Zoom, and many others, Productboard is a customer-centric product management platform that helps product managers understand customer needs and rally everyone around the roadmap. It’s an all-in-one tool that automatically consolidates all that valuable feedback floating around in other tools so your product manager can prioritize the features the customer really needs. You will appreciate how it offers a holistic view of all of your future ideas, standardized prioritization, ensures product objectives, and supports company goals.
It also provides dynamic roadmaps that you can tailor for different audiences, and your teams can always stay up-to-date on what’s happening next and why. Productboard also integrates with all the solutions your organization is comfortable using to improve the existing workflows. Overall, we firmly believe that Productboard will help you reimagine how you build the product for tomorrow and assist your company in building the product that truly matters to your customer.
3. ProdPad
With ProdPad, you can unlock everything you need to excel as a product manager. This product management tool can keep everyone on your team aligned and informed. This tool has all the features for streamlining a product management process, including product road mapping, idea management, and workflow. In addition, its drag and drop product roadmap editor is easy to use and lets you communicate and strengthen your strategy flawlessly. The Customer feedback tool, on the other hand, helps you find out what they are thinking so you can build the product they value the most.
Another stand-out feature is the Product Portfolio Management tool, where you can manage as many products as possible and make sure products are progressing in the right direction. ProdPad is also highly versatile since it integrates with over a thousand apps, including Azure DevOps, GitHub, Jira, and the like. When it comes to plans and pricing, ProdPad is pretty scalable, depending on your needs. So, to clear the chaos and unite the teams, ProdPad is an excellent choice.
4. airfocus
Every product is unique, so as the teams. Therefore, you need a product management tool that combines flexibility with product strategic superpowers and modularity. And airfocus offers exactly that. Key features of this product management software include quick and easy road mapping, prioritization with Scoring Frameworks, Priority Poker and OKRs. Furthermore, it allows you to keep product feedback organized in one place, generate insights by linking feedback to problems, keep your customers up to date and build transparency throughout the journey.
Additionally, you can connect this software with popular tools like Jira, Trello, Asana, Zapier, and more to save time and keep everyone in sync. Overall, airfocus is the best modular product management software capable of creating the perfect strategy for your team and product to move forward.
5. Craft.io
Craft.io offers full collaboration among the teams, supervisors, customers, and stakeholders. It helps you understand customer needs, articulate decision making, and establish clear product processes. Craft.io is packed with powerful product management features like capacity planning, road mapping, a centralized feedback portal, and things like that. There is also a drag and drop editor, where you can create strategic roadmaps that seamlessly connect with other features.
Moreover, it comes with different roadmap views to visualize how objectives and key results are related to specific features. You can customize and share these tailored views with stakeholders to bring clarity to your product decisions.
Another feature that really stands out is Craft.io’s Strategic Inputs which lets you create a central hub of all product information from personas to key results and objectives to help stakeholders understand the motive behind each decision. Furthermore, it seamlessly integrates with all the popular development and feedback tools, including Google Workspace, Dropbox, GitHub, and more, to boost your workflows.
Craft.io’s pricing starts at $39 monthly, which is reasonable considering the features you are getting. On top of that, you get a free 14-day trial. Taking everything into consideration, it’s safe to say that Craft.io helps build transparency and alignment across your business. Similarly, it takes product management to the next level.
Product management is undoubtedly one of the most complex jobs in an organization. The best way to secure an excellent output from it is by keeping the process involved in synergy and connected all the time. Good product management tools can help you do that and more. Therefore, understand your goals, team, customers, and process, and choose the right tool to optimize your work.
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