Choosing Your Product Management Tools: What to Consider

Product Management tools are like rocks on a beach. There are plenty to pick up and take home with you, but finding a special one that offers more than the others – like having a fossil inside – now that’s a real challenge. As a Product Manager, you’ve probably tried out multiple Product Management tools already, seeking one that fits your business and processes like a glove. But the reality is, it’s hard to find a tool that works for you. 

Plus, the stakes are pretty high when choosing Product Management tools. It’s more than just an app; it’s the spine of your Product Management best practices. Your product strategy, team collaboration, and ultimately the success of your product hinges on the tools you use. 

When you put it in black and white: A better Product Management tool means a better product. Using solid tools drives solid results. 

The right tool can transform the way you approach Product Management, potentially making you better at your job. A misaligned tool that doesn’t cut the mustard can set you up for failure. 

So how do you choose the best Product Management tools? That’s where we come in. If you’re in the market to upgrade and improve your current setup, here’s all you need to know to ensure your next tools aren’t just good – they’re game-changing. 

What are Product Management tools? 

A Product Management tool is any piece of software or web application that allows a PM to perform one of the many key Product Management tasks. 

These Product Management tools can either be point solutions, focusing on one particular area of the Product Management cycle (like product analytics tools), or they could be complete platforms that act as a central hub to help you manage your entire workflow (like ProdPad). 

Whether your tool stack includes a combination of a few point solutions, alongside an all-in-one platform, or you’re just relying on one Product Management tool, you should have functionality that covers every key stage, from idea generation, planning, roadmapping, prioritization, delivery, analysis, and feedback.

What Product Management tools have in common (which generic project or task management tools don’t have) is the fact that they are purpose-built for Product Managers and Product Teams. They are designed to help you not just build any old product, but build the right product. That said, they should also support the wider team, and be useful for your Development and Design Teams to use alongside their role-specific stack. The best Product Management tools will also offer solutions for the important stakeholders and contributors that you need to keep informed. But we’ll come on to what separates the great Product Management tools from the rest later…

What do Product Management tools need to do? 

When choosing Product Management tools, you need to start with the key functions you have to perform as a Product Manager. Your suite of tools will be no good if they don’t help you perform your crucial day-to-day work. 

Think of a good Product Management tool, or stack of tools, as a Swiss army knife, loaded with gadgets and gizmos to help you out in various situations. A Product Manager has a lot on their plate, and the right set of tools can help you organize it all like a pro. 

Whether you’re evaluating your current tools, or putting together a new technology stack to improve your processes, here’s a checklist of the functionality you need to have. The best way to think about this list of requirements is to map it against the typical Product Management cycle – so working from ideation and strategy planning through discovery, building, launching and testing – all the way back to how that testing influences your strategy and planning going forward.

For each stage of the Product Management lifecycle, there are specific things you’ll need from your tool stack. We’ve mapped those out below.

Let’s drill into each requirement in turn…

Strategy and roadmapping

You’ll need a tool in your stack that allows you to create, adjust, and share product roadmaps with ease. You need a clear, high-level view of where your product is going, and the ability to communicate that direction to stakeholders and your team. Look for features that allow you to

• Present your roadmap in a way that is easy to understand
• Visualize time horizons (without necessitating exact dates – that’s for release planning, not roadmapping)
• Customize multiple views with different levels of detail
• Publish roadmaps both internally and externally
• Capture and communicate your product vision and overall strategy
• Set and manage product goals and/or OKRs
• Manage roadmaps across entire portfolios, product lines, and individual products
• Get a helping hand from generative AI 

Needless to say, ProdPad (one of the best Product Management tools on the market) answers all these needs and more😉. 

The best Product Management tools are structured around agile roadmap formats that support Agile Product Development. The best example of this is the Now-Next-Later roadmap, around which ProdPad is structured. If you’re unclear about which roadmap format is right for you, we’d suggest you think about that first, before you head off to find your perfect roadmapping product management tool. Learn more about the different roadmap formats with the help of our Complete List of Product Roadmap Formats.

Idea capturing

Whether ideation and idea capturing happens before or after roadmapping is debatable. In reality, it’s a bit of both. Sometimes ideas come top down – fed by the strategic objectives the business has set or the broad product vision you have – and sometimes it’s the smaller ideas that feed your strategy and roadmap as each one is evaluated and validated. 

Regardless of the order in which these stages happen, the fact remains, ideation and idea capturing is a major area of Product Management and is certainly something a Product Management tool should help you out with.  

Brilliant ideas can come from anywhere, and without a Product Management tool to capture and centralize them, you’ll end up all over the place. You, your teammates, and even your customers will have awesome brain waves while you go about your day. Your tools need to make it simple to capture, store, and organize these ideas so they’re ready for you to prioritize and enrich when you come to do your backlog refinement.

Good Product Management tools for Idea capture should offer:

• A central place to gather ideas from multiple sources 
• Lots of different ways in which to submit ideas
• Integrations with a host of other tools your stakeholders already use (to make idea submission super easy for people)
• The ability to tag, sort, filter, and view your collection of ideas
• A connection to your roadmap so you can easily promote ideas from your backlog onto your prioritized roadmap
• A space to evolve each idea and capture all discussions and decisions made
• AI Assistance to help you organize your ideas and handle things like duplication
• A link to your customer feedback to help evidence, validate, and prioritize ideas

Prioritization 

Prioritization is really the crux of your job as a Product Manager. You don’t have to be the world’s most creative ideator or a technical whizz kid, but you DO have to know how to make the best, data-driven decisions. It’s up to you to determine what should be worked on and when. 

Having a Product Management tool that helps with this is invaluable. So, what do you need to prioritize? You have to prioritize your ideas backlog, your roadmap initiatives and, to some extent, your customer feedback. 

It is therefore a good idea to make sure whatever Product Management tool you select for your roadmapping, idea management, and feedback management has built-in features to help you quickly spot the opportunities that are worth prioritizing.   

Design and prototyping

Visualizing your product is a huge part of the development process. Including a design and prototyping tool in your set-up should allow you to create wireframes, mockups, or prototypes that help align teams on the look and feel of the product before it gets built. Collaboration with Design Teams is easier when everyone can see and comment on the same vision.

Collaboration and messaging

As a Product Manager you’ll be working with a lot of different teams, be it Design, Development, Marketing, you name it. A solid Product Management tool that has great collaboration functionality makes it easy to communicate, share updates, and keep everyone in the loop. Think chat features, file sharing, and discussion threads, all in one place. 

You should also consider how those stakeholders you need to collaborate with usually do their communication. You don’t want everyone in your wider organization to have to log into your Product Management tool every time they want to share something, or you need to get their input. 

So, the best Product Management collaboration tools will be able to integrate with communication channels like Slack or Microsoft Teams. This way you can slot your Product Management tool right into your existing ecosystem and get a much better engagement rate from the wider organization. 

Documentation

You need to write down everything you do as a Product Manager. Having access to a tool that acts as a centralized place for all your product documents like requirements, meeting notes, workflows, and technical specs, is non-negotiable. Your tool needs to allow for easy organization, version control, and sharing.

Feature flagging

Sometimes you want to roll out a feature to only a subset of users or make it easy to turn features on or off. A tool that allows you to feature flag makes it much simpler for you to test features in real-world scenarios without the risk of a full-scale release.

A/B testing

When it comes to optimizing your product, A/B testing is an important part of product discovery. Amongst your Product Management tools, you’ll need one that lets you experiment with different versions of a feature to see what works best. You should be able to set up tests, monitor results, and implement changes based on the data.

Onboarding and adoption

It’s not enough to get products or features shipped, you need to make sure your users actually use them and see the value. That’s why it’s worth having a tool in your stack that will help you guide your users through new experiences. 

Having the ability to create and publish product tours that overlay your product UI and include prompts and guides to aid onboarding and adoption of new features, can be a game-changer. Look out for code-free tools that mean, as PM, you can spin up a tour or add annotations without having to rope in Developers. 

Have a read of our 9 Best User Onboarding Software Tools list for more on what to look for in such a tool.

Customer feedback 

Where would you be without a steady flow of customer feedback? You’d be operating blind – making product decisions in the dark. Gathering and using customer feedback to refine and improve your product is such an integral part of Product Management and you should take your tooling in this area very seriously. 

Look for Product Management tools that allow you to collect customer insights through as many channels as possible – surveys, portals, feedback forms, email, messenger tools, browser extensions, and more. It’s even better if they integrate with your existing channels, so the voice of the customer is always within reach.

A great tool will also be able to keep track of recurring feedback, helping you to identify the main themes that keep cropping up. ProdPad allows you to track customer feedback in this way, helping you to make more meaningful improvements.

The best customer feedback management tools will include:

• Easy ways for customers to submit feedback
• Integrations with the tools your customer-facing teams use so you can automatically route feedback into your tool
• The ability to segment, filter, sort, and search across your entire collection of feedback
• Trend analysis to show your frequency of feedback over time
• Thematic analysis, ideally powered by AI, to automatically surface the themes in your feedback 
• A connection to your idea backlog so related feedback and be linked to your existing ideas 
• A way to close the loop and notify customers when a solution to their feedback is released

Analytics and reporting

As a Product Manager, data is your best friend. It helps you make better decisions and gives you evidence to back up what you choose to work on. Whether it’s user behavior, sales trends, or product adoption metrics to track feature performance, you need a tool that gives you access to actionable insights. 

Real-time analytics, clear dashboards, and customizable reports are key to tracking the health of your product and making data-driven decisions. Read our top picks of the best product analytics tools below.

User tracking

Understanding how users engage with your product is essential. You’ll need a tool to help you monitor user flows, identify friction points, and any red flags for customer churn, so you can see where improvements can be made. Think heatmaps, session recordings, and usage metrics.

Can you just have one Product Management tool?

Here’s the tea: no single Product Management tool is going to handle everything that you need. Some will come close and offer a busload of features, but to get the full scope of functionality, you’re going to want to have an arsenal of tools at your disposal. 

A Product Manager wears so many hats. One second you’re planning a roadmap, the next you’re deep in user research and analysis. That’s why it’s rare to find one tool that does it all. And, indeed, do you want a jack of all trades? Probably not – you know what they say about those – master of none and all that. Instead, you’re likely going to want a tool stack that looks a little like this…. 

You should keep your strategy together with your roadmap, the ideas that feed that roadmap, and the customer feedback that fuels those ideas all together in one place. The relationship between those three elements is so intrinsic you shouldn’t separate them.

As we’ve already said, you need to apply prioritization across roadmaps, ideas and your feedback – so your prioritization tool should also sit together with these and ideally be all part of the same platform. 

Next, you’ll need to think about how and where you capture all your collaboration – the discussions, questions, and decision logs. What is it you’re collaborating over? It’s your roadmap, your individual product ideas, it’s the feedback that informs both those things. So again, look for a tool that allows you to enjoy a single source of truth and captures your discussion and collaboration right where you do your decision making and planning. 

The same goes for documentation. You’ll want to keep that logged in your roadmap and idea management tool. This way, you can be confident that nothing ever gets lost and that all decisions and documentation are easily accessible and available whenever they’re needed. 

Let us just pause here to point out that the tool we’ve just described is ProdPad.

ProdPad is a complete Product Management tool that gives you a single source of truth for all things product. It’s the space from which you can run your entire product strategy and the execution of it. So before we go any further, let me offer you the opportunity to find out more! The best way to see everything ProdPad has to offer (which is all of the above and more) is to book a demo with the team and let us understand your exact needs so show you how ProdPad can help. So, why not jump on that now and book a slot? I’ll wait here until you’re back….

Right, you’re back. 

Now, what about the other tools we suggest you have in your Product Management tool stack? The next important tool will be the one you use alongside your Development team to organize and manage your delivery planning. This bit is important…. You SHOULD have a separate tool for this. You should never confuse strategic planning and roadmapping with tactical release planning and delivery. The former is about WHAT you should build and the latter is HOW you will build it. 

There are many benefits to keeping your delivery planning separate from your strategy planning, including:

• A cleaner, better-defined development backlog
• A happier, less overwhelmed engineering team
• A dedicated strategic space for you as a Product Manager

To find out more, watch our very own CEO and Co-Founder Janna Bastow talk it through below: 

Typically the following functions would be performed by point solution tools:

• Design tools
• Product analytics 
• Onboarding and adoption 
• User behavior tracking

What makes good Product Management tools? 

You know what Product Management tools need to allow you to do, but what about the elements and characteristics that make them good? Not all Product Management tools are created equal, you need to know what to look for to choose the best for you. 

Keen to know what sets the best options apart? Here’s what you should look for, broken down by the core functions your tools should have: 

1. Idea management

When idea management is concerned, a great Product Management tool will act like your digital suggestion box – but on steroids. You need to be able to gather ideas from everywhere: your internal team, customers, stakeholders, or even that lightbulb moment during a coffee break. 

But being able to simply collect ideas isn’t enough – it needs functionality that allows you to structure these ideas in a way that makes them easy to access, track, and eventually act on. The best tools give you a system where teams or customers can vote on ideas or provide feedback, helping you to prioritize the right ideas while creating a culture of collaboration. Why guess which feature will be a hit when you can have your users and team weigh in?

2. Roadmapping capabilities

Good roadmaps are like the North Star for your product – but flexibility is key when choosing your Product Management tools. You need tools that offer visually clear and engaging roadmaps that are easy to adjust as priorities inevitably shift. 

The best tools should make it simple to share these roadmaps with stakeholders, ensuring everyone stays aligned and on the same path. 

3. Prioritization frameworks

You’ll never run out of ideas, but you can run out of time. A powerful Product Management tool helps you prioritize features based on critical factors like business impact, customer demand, and development effort, ensuring you’re always working on what matters most. 

No two products, or companies, are the same, so a good tool lets you customize criteria based on what’s most relevant to your business, whether that’s revenue potential, strategic alignment, or customer pain points.

4. Collaboration and communication

Communication is the heartbeat of any project. It prevents you from working in silos and allows you to access the expertise of your product team. Your tool should have built-in features that make it easy for teams to collaborate in real time, whether through commenting, tagging, or direct integrations with platforms like Slack. 

Keeping stakeholders informed of your progress shouldn’t feel like a chore. A good Product Management tool offers quick and easy ways to share progress updates, whether it’s through automated reports or shareable dashboards that you can customize to suit the viewer.

5. Customer feedback integration

If you’re not listening to your customers, you’re missing a trick. You need a tool to act as a centralized hub for you to track and store customer feedback, whether it comes from emails, surveys, social media, or customer service channels. This allows you to keep your finger on the pulse and ensures customer needs guide your product decisions. 

The best tools don’t just collect feedback, they help you connect that feedback to specific product ideas or features, helping you to build what your customers actually want.

6. Integration with other tools

The best Product Management tools should play nicely with your favorite dev and design tools. Seamless integration means fewer headaches and smoother workflows, allowing you to manage everything from concept to release cohesively. 

Moreover, connecting with customer relationship management (CRM) tools brings customer feedback into your product planning process, creating a feedback loop that directly influences product direction.

7. Scalability 

Your Product Management tools should grow with you. Scalability is key if you don’t want to outgrow your tool within a few years and have to go through the process of finding another one. Consider tools that have a pricing model that allows you to easily add more users when you need to, while not pushing up the costs too much. You need to find a tool that works for you now but is also future-proofed so that it works with you as you grow and change.

How to choose the best Product Management tools for you?

The Product Management tools you use should tick all the boxes that you need. Here’s your playbook for finding the perfect match. The right tool can make the difference between good and great Product Management.  

• Identify what you need: Before you dive into your search, be clear on the Product Management feature gaps you’re looking to fill. Clarifying your specific needs will streamline your decision-making and prevent you from opting for a tool that you don’t really need. 
• Think about who will use it: Is the tool you’re looking for going to be used by just your Product team, or will other departments get in on the action? Knowing the number of expected users will help you manage costs and find a tool that’s easy enough for everyone to use. A complex tool will lead to your team spending more time trying to work it out. 
• Consider integrations: You want your new Product Management tool to fill gaps and integrate with your current suite of applications. Make sure to find a tool that’s compatible and that doesn’t force you to change the way you’re working. 
• Know what success looks like: Have an idea of your desired outcomes. What do you want to get from the new tool? By thinking about outcomes instead of features, you’ll find a tool that provides maximum impact. Knowing your clear metrics for success will guide your selection process. 
• Try before you buy: Many tools offer a free trial or reverse trial so that you can try it out. Take advantage of this and dive headfirst. Really get a feel of the tool you’re trying out and explore all the features to see if it really fits your needs. 

Find the Product Management tools for you

In the hectic world of Product Management, the tools you choose can significantly impact your team’s effectiveness and your product’s success. The right Product Management tools empower you to navigate the complexities of your role with confidence and clarity.

As you select the best tools for your needs, remember to explore options that provide comprehensive functionality, integrate smoothly with your existing systems, and enhance collaboration across departments. Whether you’re a seasoned Product Manager or just stepping into the role, investing time in evaluating these tools will pay off massively, helping you to create a product that’s thriving.

Need a really good option? Try ProdPad. We mean it, we’re one of the best Product Management tools around. With our robust features designed specifically for Product Managers, ProdPad offers a centralized platform that handles almost everything from roadmapping to user feedback integration, and lots more. Don’t just take our word for it: check out our customer stories to see how we help. 

So what are you waiting for? Take the plunge and start your journey with ProdPad today and see how our tool can help you become an even better Product Manager.