11+ Best Tools for Product Managers

11+ Best Tools for Product Managers

In the fast-paced world of product management, the right tools can make all the difference. Managing product development, from brainstorming ideas to launching a market-ready product, involves intricate coordination and seamless communication across teams. Thankfully, modern product management tools are designed to streamline these processes, ensuring you stay organized and efficient. But with so many options available, how do you choose the best ones for your needs?

Know What You Want Your Product Manager Tools to Do

Before you dive into the sea of product management tools, it’s essential to identify your specific needs. What are your current pain points? Where are you losing time? The best tools should address these issues directly, without adding unnecessary complexity. Key categories to consider include:

• Product analytical software

• Marketing tools

• Communication tools

• Product development tracking tools

• Roadmapping software

By understanding your needs, you can choose tools that integrate well with your existing systems and potentially offer multiple functionalities, reducing your learning curve and boosting productivity.

Top Tools for Product Managers

The following are some of the best tools and strategies for product managers from the hundreds of options out there. These are tried-and-true options, those with a proven track record of supporting product manager tasks, improving efficiency, and keeping your product management on track. From the planning through the delivery, these tools stand out.

#1: Hopscotch: Trial-to-Paid Conversion Solution

The top product on our list of tools is Hopscotch, and for good reason. This platform is a game-changer for product managers, significantly boosting your chances of converting free trial users into loyal, paying customers. Here’s why Hopscotch is the ultimate tool you need:

• No coding required: You can customize Hopscotch to fit your needs without any code changes or waiting for a developer.

• Increase conversion rates: Hopscotch is designed to reduce churn and improve customer satisfaction, turning more free trials into paid subscriptions.

• Seamless user onboarding: Quickly onboard new users, educate them effectively, and drive feature adoption effortlessly.

With Hopscotch, you can onboard new users in moments, educate those users in seconds, and then drive the adoption of your features. This not only encourages clients to start working with you but also puts them on the path to becoming loyal customers (and that means they will keep buying from you for years to come).

Hopscotch offers excellent features, including segmentation, in-app messaging, and interactive product tours. These allow users to get answers to their questions and see exactly what they need to do to engage fully with your product.

Ready to transform your trial users into loyal customers? Try Hopscotch today and watch your conversion rates soar!

#2: Jira Product Discovery: Ideal for Idea and Relationship Building

Jira Product discovery is an excellent tool for centralizing the tasks you need to take to capture and prioritize ideas as they start to move through your mind. That is, it helps to support taking ideas and creating a road map that allows all stakeholders to dive in and get committed to the product. Some of the reasons that we like Jira Product Discovery include:

• Templates and more templates. You’ll find templates for anything you need to do, including road mapping, strategy, and product requirements.

• Customization. You can create customizable and sharable roadmaps that allow you to communicate easily and quickly.

• Brings teams together. The key features of this tool really help to keep everyone on the same page.

What Jira Product Discovery does well is creating a streamlined process, structuring ideas and tasks, and ensuring good communication. It ultimately cuts down on time spent and money on product development.

#3: Google Analytics: The Best in Insight Development

It is not hard to see whyGoogle Analytics is the best option out there for gathering data on projects and building success. Analytics are everything today – it defines what you put money into and spend time on, and accurate insight into your objectives can be critical to success. Google Analytics is the tried-and-true favorite, providing the bandwidth and reliability most projects need. Some of the key benefits we see in Google Analytics over other products include:

• Super easy-to-use database and tools. It is the industry’s leading product.

• Track visibility with ease. Who knows how to track user activity better than Google?

• Create ads with simplistic design tools that are valuable ads producing results.

Google Analytics is also an excellent choice because it allows you to integrate with the full line-up of Google products. That includes Google Search Console, Google Ads, and Google Data Studio. All of it is very easy to learn and accessible for companies of any size and type.

#4: Slack: Team Communication

Communication is often a problem for product managers because there is so much on the line and so many people working towards the same solution.Slack does a great job of efficiently supporting communication in real-time. There are several things we love about Slack:

• It is a cloud-based management tool with built-in collaboration that makes the entire process easy.

• It’s highly reliable and easy for anyone to learn, even those who may not be familiar with a lot of tech.

• Streamlined enough for mobile apps.

While many tools provide mobile apps for communication, Slack is very easy to learn and use (and can be used on just about any browser or mobile device.) You will also find that it is effective, providing all of the collaboration features you need to get work done without bogging you down in the process.

#5: GoToMeeting: Customer Interviewing

While Zoom and GoToMeeting are both excellent for communication within your team and organization for video-focused collaboration, GoToMeeting is an excellent choice overall for those who want customer interviews to be seamless and straightforward. It does a great job of recording the call and allowing users to go back to review information. We love several things about this tool:

• You don’t know when your customer will have information that’s really going to be impactful. This way, you capture it.

• Simple-to-use tools make recording effortless.

• Excellent for capturing reviews.

An authentic and easy-to-use tool, for any video communication, GoToMeeting is a great choice for all-around good use.

#6: Confluence: For Brainstorming

Confluence is by far the best choice for brainstorming data. The whiteboard feature is as authentic as a board-room meeting can be. It also offers some great features when it comes to real-time and asynchronous functions, giving you the ability to brainstorm as and how you need to across your team. Problem-solving in product development is highly effective. Some key benefits of using this particular brainstorming tool include:

• Excellent feature-driven system, including stamps, votes, and timers that really help to keep the motivation and focus up and keep people engaged.

• It is a great choice for those using Jira since it can connect directly to it.

• Teams can effortlessly connect and communicate in real-time, when needed, to solve an underlying problem, even if it is in the hands of the customer.

Confluence is not hard to use, and it also does a great job of allowing you to streamline activities at the same time. Keep that whiteboard feature going without having to pause the work you are doing otherwise.

#7: Optimizely: Excellent for A/B Testing

One of the most challenging aspects of product management is testing out various options and solutions to find the best solution. Optimizely makes an excellent choice with A/B testing. You can set it up quickly, allowing you to make decisions right away and then tweak them as you need to. This helps to improve outcomes overall and creates better results. Some of the key features to consider include:

• Multi-page experimentation. That is going to help you gather more information with ease and speed. This is a good option for deep insights.

• Predefined conversion goals are simple to set and track. The entire tool is very easy to use overall, and that means setting up and running tests will not take up too much of your time.

• Fast results. That is the key benefit of this product – you get answers to what is better quicker.

Experimentation is rather direct and simple with Optimizely. It can work with various other platforms and can help you to make changes to your A/B testing in a breeze. You do not have a big learning curve to master either.

#8: Figma: Prototyping

Figma is a tried-and-true tool for many reasons. For those who are looking for a reliable and easy-to-use interface that enables you to design from the ground up without a lot of complicated code or procedures, Figma is a reliable option. Use it for brainstorming, too, though it excels at making wireframes and prototypes really effortlessly created. There are other benefits of Figma as well, including:

• Excellent assortment of templates to make the process easier. That includes project proposals.

• Excellent collaboration features, too. This helps to bring all members of the product design team together to solve problems and come up with new ideas.

• It’s versatile enough for most product managers. Many of today’s product managers have to do more than just manage development, and Figma is versatile enough to work with all needs.

Figma is also one of the most popular options for design and prototyping. That means that it is easy to work with throughout your entire team. If you have a lot of responsibilities to tackle and need a streamlined solution, choose Figma.

#9: Miro: Collaboration and Virtualization

Miro is an excellent product management tool for numerous reasons, but especially because of how flexible it is when it comes to both collaboration and visualization in product management. It is a collaborative online whiteboard platform that helps people work together. When you want to meld insights together, this is a tool that is excellent for several reasons:

• The interactive canvas provides visualization features like no other. It’s also simplistic to use to manage projects.

• Nice features include zooming in and out, moving through the planner tool, and overall task distribution.

• Miro is a visual workshop. For teams that need to see what is happening at every stage, this tool works the best.

Miro is reliable, easy to use, and offers nice features like process mapping and scaled product planning. It’s interactive and has a learning curve, but one that is worth exploring.

#10: Jira: Communicating Off the Grid

Jira has to be mentioned as a must-have for product managers because of its ability to work with those who are stakeholders without a tech focus. It offers excellent access to project data. Some other features include:

• Real-time project data so there is no delay in communication and collaboration.

• Create dependencies and build out automation within tasks to fit any specific process or goal.

• Easy to learn and implement by non-development team members.

Jira is also an excellent choice when you want to integrate non-development tasks and need a visual workflow of all components of the project.

#11: Gartner: Industry Research

This is the type of tool many do not think about, but for some product managers, industry research is critical. Gartner offers the best of the best for several key reasons:

• It is a trusted and reliable source of information, which gives you the confidence to use it.

• It provides guided and strategic thinking opportunities for your team, allowing you to minimize risks entering the market.

• Ideal for market development and understanding.

Gartner is not a simplistic solution and can be very expensive. Yet, it provides valuable information that can help you bring your product to market faster with better insights.

Which of these is the best product management tool for your needs? If you are a product manager, you need these tools in place to push your objective forward.