Top 10 Product Management tools

What’s the purpose of the products we manage?

It’s not a trick question. Their purpose is to deliver value to our customers. And we spend days, weeks, and months trying to understand what our customers value and how we can profitably deliver a solution.

Some of this is hard thinking work but much of it is hard work without much thinking needed i.e. the administration, communication, and documentation of our ideas, roadmaps, and requirements

Most of us do this using a generic office application – perhaps tracking requirements in a spreadsheet and presenting our strategy and roadmap in a slide deck.

But have you ever thought it might not the best way of doing things?

Things easily get missed. Making changes is cumbersome and collaborating is difficult. Not just that, but it’s tough to enforce a standard approach on the company – everyone makes up their own way of doing things.

However, there is a quiet revolution underway. Some software companies have been looking at what we’d value as product managers and have come up with products to help us do a better job. Their tools can help embed best practice approaches and enable product management to be more efficient and effective.

In our most recent industry survey, we investigated the tools used by product managers. We asked questions about the tools they use for 8 different product activities: product strategy, getting insight, tracking requirements, prioritization, roadmapping, creating mockups, project management, and metrics & analytics.

Please read our latest Survey of the Product Management profession to see the tools most frequently recommended by product managers.

Andrew Dickenson
Director, Product Focus