Many product management tools are, effectively, collaboration tools. Roadmapping tools and project management tools are workflow tools to drive alignment and communication. This makes sense, since one of the most important functions for product managers is to facilitate high-quality, high-velocity decision-making across R&D. Here are some tools the industry and my team have found to be most helpful.
I read a poll recently, and not surprisingly, it found the No. 1 tool for PMs is Slack. I totally agree with that. It’s critical to the job, especially since Slack opened up and let third parties outside your organization connect in your channel. At Feedback Loop, we have Slack groups with our customers, we have Slack groups internally, and we have Slack groups with consultants. It’s pretty much the best collaboration tool we have.
Clubhouse is another great tool we’ve adopted. It offers most of the features product and engineering teams need from JIRA without requiring extensive configuration and ongoing maintenance. For an industry where most tools are either overly simple or overly complicated, Clubhouse strikes a careful balance. The workflow and iterations capabilities enable our product teams to operate with high degrees of collaboration, flexibility, and autonomy. Using Google Forms and Zapier, we also use Clubhouse to manage feature requests from both internal and external stakeholders. And they’ll soon be releasing a wiki tool, so we can have spec, project management, and our roadmap all within one platform.
Our team also loves Pendo for product analytics. Similar to Clubhouse, Pendo stays within its lane and doesn’t try to overcomplicate its offering with bloated features and overly customizable options. They combine a powerful analytics suite with some basic but useful functionality for surveying users in-app and offering interactive tours for new features.
Some other solid tools we use regularly are:
- InVision for collaborating and communicating on prototypes.
- Zoom (obviously) for video and communication.
- A lot of Google Docs for plain English ideas.
- Notion for more technical diagramming and documentation.
- Mural for online white-boarding.
I’m always looking for new tools to make our product lives easier, and I’m open to suggestions. What are your most useful PM apps?
