The main objective of any product manager is to ensure the process of product management runs smoothly and flawlessly: from the concept to release. However, it's all about the ideal world.
In order to present a brilliant product to the world, it is important to learn how to use convenient and multifunctional online tools that facilitate management and open up new opportunities for managers, expanding their professional horizons. In this article, you will find 15 smart tools that contribute to the professional success of product managers in 2019.
Even if you have strong professional product management skills and abilities, it may be not enough. Unique specialized software facilitates product management tasks, increase process efficiency and make the product competitive.
Not long time ago, product managers had not so many opportunities to manage their tasks, using spreadsheets, Excel, PowerPoint, or the most primitive software for managing projects and products.
Nowadays, it much easier to deal with online Kanban cards or apply convenient Gantt charts to write a smart product roadmap. However, there is no need to rush — it will be described a little below.
Currently, every product manager is able to choose from a variety of free and paid services and online tools. Modern software for product management helps in various areas:
- product management
- project management
- roadmap management
- design and UI
- research work
- UX
- product analytics
- creating landings
- marketing (email marketing, SMM, video marketing)
- external and internal communication, etc.
This post is devoted to the optimal set of tools that may product managers to succeed in 2019. So here they are.
15 Strategic Tools for Product Managers
JIRA
The classic software for managing projects, products and teams does not lose popularity and is in demand all over the world.
Product teams often need multi-functionality for complex projects, including technical solutions. In this case, JIRA is a classic option. However, many companies exclude the platfrom because of its complexity and technicality. Many marketers, designers or product managers will agree with this statement.
JIRA suits developers, managers, and teams to help manage projects and products, set and move tasks, and communicate within the team.
JIRA does an excellent job of launching products and automating workflows, optimizing the most time-consuming tasks, and helping to focus on the value of the product. With its assistance, managers timely identify challenges, visualize details and descriptions of the problems they encounter. JIRA proposes to use various useful features that allow defining a product vision and tasks related to building a roadmap, managing backlog items, defining priorities and so on.
Confluence
Confluence empowers product teams allowing them to effectively collaborate and share information with each other.
The platform offers to create pages and blogs that can be commented and edited by all team members who have access. You may also attach files and display them on the page for more convenience. Many people in product management need to develop, view, edit, comment and publish content as part of the collaboration. Confluence was designed to integrate with JIRA, and they have many points of contact.
Slack
Slack is a collaboration tool that unites all team members in a company. It creates a healthy ecosystem for work with the product, unites people and information in one place, helps to communicate effectively, stay in touch and speed up processes.
It assists product managers when they need to start new tasks, hire a new employee, contact separate team members, review sales contracts, work with a budget, conduct A/B tests, plan the next office opening and much more. Slack looks like an excellent solution and covers all these needs.
Hygger
Hygger is a project management tool with built-in feature prioritization and advanced backlog management.
The platform allows product managers to create and share high-level roadmaps, prioritize ideas and features, execute tasks on Kanban/Scrum boards or Tasks lists.
Hygger assists to choose the most important and profitable features even when each feature looks exciting. To prioritize features, you may spread them out on Value/Effort or Eisenhower prioritization matrix, and send the winners to work or apply more complex prioritization frameworks (ICE and RICE models, Weighted scoring).
Hygger also proposes to choose traditional tasks lists — for cases, when it is not necessary to use Kanban boards, and simple tasks lists are more habitual for you. Hygger combines its brilliant functionality with the ease of use. It looks great for those who work on their own products in software development, product management, marketing, creative agencies, and other teams.
Intercom
Product managers care about the ways to attract and retain customers. That's why Intercom looks like a great solution to succeed. The service positions itself as a modern tool for sales, marketing, support and quick communication with customers. It demonstrates who is using your product or website, and makes it easy to communicate with them personally.
Intercom will show you what your customers are doing (monitor, filter and segment each client), convert leads, use bots, enhance boarding and attract new users, turn subscribers into active and valuable clients, provide self-service support and much more.
Zendesk
Zendesk helps to support services, simplifies the interaction between customers and companies. The tool is suitable for any industry and spheres that provide any customer service. It is also an ideal solution for large and small organizations.
The service may be interesting to product managers as well because it offers the following options:
- Ticket Management
- Online support
- Analytical reports
- Platform integration and some more
Typeform
It's crucial for product managers to always stay updated, receive feedback and be interested in what people think about the product and its features. They use this information to make the right decisions.
Typeform is an online tool that creates flexible, custom forms for different situations. The tool helps to prepare product reviews, surveys, tests, quizzes, business forms, contests, landing pages, registration forms, application forms, expectations lists and much more.
You are able to create all these forms without having to write lines of code. Typeform is actively used by product managers, customer success teams, market researchers, online marketers, recruiters, sales managers, and other professionals.
All the features of Typeform are aimed to attract the audience and get more feedback.
Sketch
Sketch was designed primarily for designers. But knowing how closely product managers work with designers, we can easily include this tool to the list of best PM solutions.
Being aware of Photoshop functionality is a plus, but it's not enough. In Sketch you will find some powerful features that Photoshop does not provide. The app does not weigh much and offers a rather tight menu.
The service contains built-in grids that allow you to work with design elements more smoothly. With the help of available templates, the process of design creating becomes fun and easy. Sketch may not completely replace Photoshop, but it’s great for creating websites and interfaces for product needs.
Zoom
Tools for video calls are also popular solutions in product management that help to conduct remote meetings and interviews.
Zoom is one of these solutions, it helps product managers to organize video conferences, conduct group communication, optimize team collaboration, share documents and other assets, use audio, create simple online meetings, and so on. Zoom is designed for reliable operation of the whole team.
Inspectlet
This smart service helps product managers record videos of their customers when they use the site. It assists to view all their actions.
The key point about the Inspectlet is that it helps you discover where visitors get confused and what attracts their attention the most. All these facts may help to understand user thinking and increase conversion.
Segment
This infrastructure for customer data collects, saves and sends user information to hundreds of tools with just one click. It takes care of the confusing process of installing analytics.
Segment will save time spent by engineers on installing and maintaining analytics tools. It will also be useful to marketers and product managers in test campaigns. It is used everywhere: from advertising to marketing automation.
Wootric
If you need to measure and increase NPS, Wootric is one of the best solutions. The service offers flexible ways to improve the loyalty and satisfaction of your customers.
Wootlic uses proven metric reviews to collect customer feedback through various channels. Using Wootric, you get information about customers, product, customer success, and marketing leaders, improving customer service, which will help to stimulate and increase brand loyalty.
Amplitude
As a product manager, you definitely need Amplitude to focus on identifying the most valuable in user behavior patterns.
The tool offers a set of free options for different companies. You will find excellent analytics for modern products and understanding user behavior. Amplitude will help to quickly improve business results.
Appcues
It's important for companies of all sizes to implement personalized customer onboarding. With the help of Appcues, product managers can create product tours, tutorials, and messages in the app to greet and attract their customers. You can set up a cloud application in minutes using a convenient editor.
Appcues is ideal for companies of any size and helps customers become more loyal, solving their immediate pains.
The main features of the service are:
- Unlimited streams
- Audience targeting and personalization
- Thread analytics
- Advanced behavioral targeting
- A/B testing
- Customization
Looker
Companies use Looker for analytics and a complete overview of customers. It is a business application for finding knowledge among data. The service helps use data to make decisions and act in the right direction.
You can create visualizations with a single code, Looker code will help you create and optimize your queries.
Be sure: this list is not complete, but using such a working arsenal to its full potential, even a junior product manager can quickly provide a new level of work and get success outcomes soon.
What do you think about this set of tools and about each individual service? Perhaps you have tried good alternatives. Feel free to share your experience.
Автор: HumanoIT
