Product Management
The 34 Best Product Management Tools for Your Team's Stack
Taking a product from concept to market is no small feat. There are many steps along the way, including ideation and creating roadmaps, building and development, shipping, and collecting customer feedback to share with the product team.
If you’re new to product management or a seasoned pro, there’s a whole suite of product management tools to help you master your role and leverage a productive and powerful tech stack that keeps your product release plans on track and on schedule.
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Project management tools
Project management tools are a must-have for your tech stack and give you the organizational prowess needed to manage the product development process, including tracking tasks, milestones, and progress. One of the most popular tools used by product teams is Jira, a platform trusted by established brands, including Hubspot, Dropbox, and Optimizely.
But you don’t always need to go with the big guns. Goran Luledzija, CEO of Localizely, prefers ClickUp. He says, “signing up for a practical tool like ClickUp makes the whole production process easier to follow. I lead a small team, but things can still fall through the cracks without a reliable source of information for the whole crew.”
Other project management tools we recommend for your product tech stack include:
Team communication tools
Product managers must communicate clearly with internal and external stakeholders and ensure that all departments access effective communication channels throughout the product lifecycle.
One of the best product management tools that supports top-notch team communication is Slack. Used by Airbnb, Uber, and Etsy, Slack centralizes communication into one location, allowing product teams to access one source of truth, receive updates in real-time, and easily share and align processes and documentation.
The platform also provides an impressive suite of integrations, including Jira, GitHub, G-Suite, and more, to ensure streamlined comms and workflows.
Other communication tools we recommend for your product tech stack include:
Customer insights
A must-have for any product management toolbox is a platform that allows you to tap into the mindset of your customers and gather feedback. Understanding how your customers feel about your product, the use cases and solutions they use it for, and their suggestions for improvement helps with innovation and development.
Kaegan Donnelly, senior product manager at Lumen5, uses Typeform for customer insights. He says, “I mainly use Typeform to gather insights from customers on how a new feature is working or how they would like to see a new feature work. I enjoy having multiple paths, so you can ask someone different questions based on how they answer an earlier question.”
If you don’t fancy spending time and resources writing surveys, LaunchNotes comes with a customer insights feature that allows you to collect vital information and customer feedback throughout the whole product lifecycle. The platform gives customers a dedicated communication channel to product teams and enables direct dialogue on your roadmap, new features, and recent announcements.
Other products that help capture customer insights:
User testing and analysis
If you’re not testing, iterating, and analyzing your product, how will you know how it performs in the market? There are thousands of product management tools that help with user testing and analysis, with one of our top picks being HotJar.
HotJar is a session recording app that allows product managers to analyze how users experience and engage with an app or product and use this data to influence product management decisions. For example, a click map could show users ignoring a must-view product video, while a move map shows where audience attention is held the most, allowing you to emulate this success.
Simon Bacher, CEO and co-founder of Ling, prefers a different set of product management tools for analysis. He says, “We use tools such as User Testing, Optimal Workshop, and Crazy Egg to conduct user testing and gather feedback on the usability and user experience of a product.”
Other product management tools we recommend for user testing and analysis include:
Customer interviews
Customer surveys and user testing tools provide product leaders with quantitative data. But what about qualitative insights? This is where customer interviews can help as part of your product management tech stack, as this format equips product managers with crucial information that analytics doesn’t.
Use customer interviews to glean insights into customer sentiment, pain points, and goals. The more you speak with your customers, the deeper your understanding of the problems they face.
One of our recommendations for customer interviews is the easy-to-use video conferencing software Zoom. After becoming a household name during the COVID-19 pandemic, Zoom saw growth rates of over 50% YOY and firmly positioned itself as a must-have product management tool to conduct customer interviews and keep remote teams in sync with its ability to record virtual meetings at the touch of a button.
Launchnotes also comes with a built-in customer sentiment feature powered by AI to give product managers deep insights into customer feelings — both the good and the bad.
If you’re still suffering from Zoom fatigue, check out these other customer interview tools for your product management toolbox.
Prototyping and wireframing tools
Engineering is expensive, so businesses save time and resources by creating prototypes that emulate the look and feel of how a design will behave out in the wild and presents an opportunity to gather valuable feedback before shipping.
Prototype and wireframing tools are essential for UX and UI designers. Figma is the stand-out in the market, thanks to real-time collaboration, a cloud-based interface, and simple sharing features, including integrations with Slack, Notion, and Microsoft Teams.
Not feeling Figma? Take a tour of these other prototyping and wireframing tools:
Ideas and collaboration
For GTM plans to succeed and product launches to go ahead, teams must share ideas openly and collaborate effectively. Luckily, a wide range of tools and platforms make cross-departmental collaboration seamless.
Haley Cameron, product marketing manager at OpsLevel, recommends Miro for “all things storyboarding, workshopping, and brainstorming,” whereas Gavin Alexander, content marketer at The Payments Association, shouts out Notion “for planning, Gantt charts, to-do lists, team collaboration, databases, and custom templating.”
We couldn’t compile a list of the best product management tools without giving kudos to Zapier. Jon Norris, marketing lead at Codeworks, says that the automation platform “saves us probably 3 or 4 employee's worth of time passing data back and forth between the rest of our tech stack.”
Other notable product management tools that focus on idea-sharing and collaboration include:
The product management tools you subscribe to will ultimately depend on the size of your business and company goals. Not every product manager will need all these 34 tools in their stack. But if there’s one we recommend above all else, it’s LaunchNotes to help get the right features to market in a snap. Sign up today for a free trial or request a demo.
