Tools you need as a Product Manager
Product Management is not easy, it includes a lot of different tasks, from talking to users, to creating surveys, to measuring success, data, communications, and whatnot. Using the right tools could be helpful to perform and build better.
Okay, first thing first People and Process >>>> Tools. It’s more important to build the right processes than to choose the right tool. Tools are always secondary, let’s say today one tool is popular for data analysis, and maybe tomorrow a new one would come that would beat the existing ones.
To be frank, the right tools don’t even exist (I mean every tool is the right tool if you know what you need to get out of it), again it depends on team to team, maybe for a person who’s handling mobile device products, a different tool is needed whereas compared to a person who is into finance products a completely different tool is required. So, in this, I’ll try to put some general tools there -
- Communication & Collaboration:
- Google workspace (including Gmail, Hangouts, Chat, Calendar, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Forms).
- Slack (For inter-team communications). - Design & Wireframing:
- Figma (Design, prototype, and collaborate in context and in real-time).
- Balsamiq (For building wireframes, although Figma is sufficient for all design needs)
- Canva (For making small graphics without the help of a designer) - Analytics:
This may be one of the interesting sections of the article, as for this a lot of tools exist, but you just need only a handful of tools to perform the job. Analytics tools do not know what the product is. It’s you who needs to define what data to capture, the events, the leads, the cohorts, & the reports based upon the requirements, every tool could help you find the same, but you need to know yourself first.
- Mixpanel (One of the good tools to track engagement & create cohorts, good for mobile app products)
- Google Analytics (As per my understanding sometimes not that powerful, but gives you a good idea of what people are doing on your site)
- Amplitude (Again just a different tool, doing the same things)
- Redash (Good for your Data Analysts to write queries and give results) - Project Management:
- Jira (For bug & project tracking)
- Trello (Project management tool)
- ProductPlan (Roadmapping)
- Notion (For structuring & planning things)
- Zeda.io (For planning purposes) - Brainstorming:
- Figjam (Can create user stories, team activities & much more)
- Miro (For creating mind maps & flows) - User Experience:
- Microsoft clarity/Hotjar (For user recordings & heatmaps)
- User Testing (For user testing purposes)
- Typeform (To understand user insights & get user needs)
Thus, these are the main tools that you only need to perform all functions in your job as a PM, this list is not a must-have but good to have tools, sometimes you need all these and sometimes you just don’t. Again it varies from team structure and always remembers tools are just secondary things.
