Product managers guide a product’s development and iteration processes from A to Z. Their ultimate goal is to make the product useful for customers and to deliver value to all stakeholders.

There are many digital product management tools and techniques that help product teams to execute various processes. 

These tools help you from product conception to market delivery. This includes strategy, planning and sharing, prototyping, support for onboarded customers, user behavior analysis, and productivity. But what works extremely well for others might not work for you because in product management there is no one-size-fits-all.

That is why we have curated this list for you. It’ll help you take your pick from the best product management tools available today.

Every SaaS product management tool is grouped under a certain category. Make sure you’re selecting the right tools according to your company size, product type, and stage.

With that in mind, here’s the ultimate list of the best software product management tools and apps to have in your stack.

1. Product Roadmapping Tool

What is a Product Roadmapping Tool

A product roadmap is a strategy document that visually represents the product development stages you plan to go through over time. It also helps in aligning the efforts of various teams during the product management process while keeping them on the same page.

Throughout all the phases of product management, product roadmap tools serve the critical purpose of guiding future sprints while keeping a record of past developments.

While choosing roadmapping tools for product management, you have to understand that it is a single source of truth for everyone involved. Hence, everyone seeks different details from the roadmap.

This is where Zeda.io’s comprehensive roadmapping tool comes in handy.

a. Zeda.io

Zeda.io is one of the best product management platforms that offers a comprehensive roadmap designed to provide a clear and concise view of your product development progress. Our product roadmap software offers live roadmaps for different products, customers, sprints, goals, and more.

These live roadmaps are dynamic and updated in real-time, ensuring that all stakeholders are well informed of any changes or updates to your product development process. You can easily sync your dev tools and stakeholder requests to ensure that everyone involved has access to the latest information about your product's progress.

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Also Read: Free Roadmapping Tools: The Ultimate Review and Comparision Guide

As one of the best tools for product management, Zeda.io enables you to create roadmaps in seconds and share feedback by selecting features you want to incorporate into your next sprint. Zeda.io is an all-encompassing product management solution and product roadmap tool is just a piece of the larger puzzle.

Suggested Read: Top AI Tools for Product Teams

b. Roadmunk

Roadmunk is an end-to-end roadmapping tool that helps you to gather consumer feedback, determine what to build next, and create boardroom-ready roadmaps.

This helps you to communicate your product strategy to  different stakeholders. 

It is a potential option for you if you want to streamline you product planning and streamlining processes.

c. Aha.io

Through Aha.io, users can keep track of initiative timing and scope, as well as capacity, deliverables, and dependencies from team to team.

You can easily strategize your product journey with the help of product roadmap powered by Aha.io

This roadmap ensures that you build products that have customers value.

2. Analytics

Hundreds of questions arise while building a product. 

What features do users want? How will they interact with the product? How can we make the user experience better? The list goes on.

Analytics tools help exactly with this (and so much more) in order to assess the product development efforts critically. These tools help remove roadblocks, optimize team and individual performance, help us to determine the key performance indicators (KPIs)and most importantly, increase customer satisfaction.

Here are the four most used analytics tools used by product managers to gather actionable insights.

a. Google Analytics

‍Google Analytics, one of the best free product management tools, is usually used by the marketing team to understand what the users want and whether your message is getting across on your website.

It is also equally useful for product managers, who can use it to track user behavior and website visitors.

Furthermore, because it is a Google product, integration with other product lifecycle management tools from Google such as Google Ads, Google Search Console, and Google Data Studio is pretty easy. This will allow seamless implementation if you already use these tools.

b. Adobe Analytics

‍Adobe Analytics is one of the most advanced agile product management tools in this category. It offers tons of features, as well as the ability to add custom ones.

The Analysis Workspace in this product data management tool presents data in readable forms like metrics, visualization, dimensions, and more. Report Suite generates end-to-end and independent reports for single or multiple websites or a subset of different web pages.

c. Heap

‍Heap is known for its detailed and micro product analytics, which offer you a complete dataset of user behavior without requiring engineering resources. 

This top product management tool is the only digital insights platform that gives you a complete understanding of your customers’ digital journeys, so you can quickly improve conversion, retention, and customer delight.

With this product management analytics tool, you can track the actions of every user on your product or site, then get meaningful insights to direct your next sprint. 

The best part is that it is easy to set it up. It captures all user activity as soon as you integrate it. This ease of use helps product managers get the information they need pretty fast.

d. Mixpanel

‍Mixpanel provides several cohort analyses to help product managers identify trends and understand user behavior by measuring and even predicting usage.

This product lifecycle management tool’s features help you visualize product management metrics on a customizable dashboard. You can also get interactive reports, learn which new features and functionalities are popular, and highlight power users. 

You can build retroactive funnels and analyze conversion rates on the fly!

Monitoring multiple data-driven product management tools can be hectic for product managers. The solution here would be to bring all the dashboards from all such apps to one place. This will save time and effort as you won’t have to cycle through several apps.

Zeda.io provides a solution by integrating with external analytics tools such as Mixpanel and Google Data Studio enabling you to keep an eye on all cohorts at the same time.

e. Amplitude

Amplitude is a powerful product analytics tool that provides businesses with insights into user behavior, ntion, and engagement. It offers features such as funnel analysis, cohort analysis, and user segmentation, making it easy for businesses to understand how users interact with their products.

Product analysis in Amplitude brings to you customer behavioral graphs that allows you to build product that your customer needs. It provide you with actionable insights to build products that caters to customers' requirements.

3. Collaboration Tools

In addition to project management, analytics, roadmapping, and numerous other tools, product teams need to communicate quickly to run daily operations efficiently. This is where collaboration tools ensure effective coordination and save time during discussions.

You can use quite a few features of the following SaaS product management tools for free.

a. Notion

‍Notion is a versatile tool that can be used for multiple use cases and is especially great for PMs. Whether it is writing a simple note or tracking the progress of tasks, Notion does everything for you. 

As one of the best management platform for product managers, it allows multiple views. You can choose kanban, calendar, list views, etc with multiple filter options. These features also let you use Notion as a product backlog management tool.

Suggested Read: Best Product Discovery Tool: Top 5 Picks

b. Slack

Slack is a cloud-based product management collaboration tool that allows product teams to collaborate efficiently and effectively. It is a successful and well-designed platform that provides instant messaging, advanced message search, and file transfers.

It is useful as a standalone app for desktops, mobile devices (iOS, Android, and even Windows phones), and web browsers.

c. Collato

Collato is a powerful tool that can be used to improve collaboration across teams. With Collato, teams can share information, collaborate on documents, manage tasks, and synchronize information across different tools and platforms like Notion and Jira; making teams more productive, efficient, and effective.

Collato’s new AI-powered Slack assistant also allows teams instant access to product information scattered across their tools–all within the Slack app. The best thing about Collato is since it only has secure access to your team’s information, all of the AI-generated answers are up-to-date, relevant, and correct–no more wasting time fact-checking. And don’t worry about data protection, either. Collato is SOC 2 certified.

d. Zoom

‍Zoom has been around since 2011 but became popular during the pandemic. It is as simple as launching a video calling app that allows users to interact with one another during a video conference. 

It can aid the product team in the creation of new meetings or the direct connection of an ongoing meeting.

e. Google Sites

‍Google Sites is a fantastic tool that allows users to quickly and easily create a website design for their team to collaborate on. A place where everyone can quickly receive or get their updates, and create specific product pages.

4. Customer Feedback and Survey Tools

Gathering customer feedback is an essential process for any product manager. It helps you to understand what is — and isn’t — working for your users. This allows you to serve your customers better by addressing their pain points more effectively.

We have rounded up four top tools that you can use to collect feedback.

a. SurveyMonkey

‍SurveyMonkey is one of the most popular survey tools, with over 40 million registered users. Every day, the SaaS product claims to answer 20 million questions.

Users can create complex questions that do not require any coding to receive quick and accurate responses. The tool is ideal for product teams because it allows — sharing of surveys, team analysis, custom graphics, and easy data exporting.

b. Typeform

‍Typeform operates in a different way than SurveyMonkey. It focuses on user interaction rather than creating a complex questionnaire. Typeform attempts to increase user response by interacting with the end-user. And the strategy seems to work well!

With Typeform, completion rates are four times higher than what is considered average.

c. Jotform

‍Jotform is a no-code online survey builder that seeks to undercut Typeform while also being more user-friendly.

JotForm has created a customer base of 2 million in 12 years, developing forms in 177 countries and 12 languages. It is one of the best online form builders, with a drag-and-drop designer and a large number of templates.

d. Google Forms

Sometimes the simplest tool does the job best. Google Forms doesn’t offer any exotic features and it is free to use. It’s the best choice for creating simple forms and gathering user data. Because this is a Google product, all responses are automatically saved into Google Sheets, making data transfer simple.

Collecting the feedback is the first step. To complete the customer feedback loop, you need to collate all the feedback from various tools, prioritize them, and forward them to the product development management tools to be worked upon. Moreover, you can align feedback to a feature and easily integrate them to roadmap.

Zeda.io, one of the best product management tools integrates with all the feedback tools above.

You can tag and vote on feedback to prioritize them.

You can push them to the developers through integrations directly from Zeda.io. You can integrate Zeda.io with Git and Atlassian's product management tools. Zeda.io aids you in managing all the product management tasks in a single platform.

Zeda.io is an all-encompassing platform that handles every step of the product development process, from collecting feedback and developing a roadmap to setting objectives and releasing the final product. It helps you in every step of the way!

e. Frill

Frill is an embeddable widget that collects feedback, plans features, integrates them into the roadmap, and announces new customer updates. Just a white-labeled widget is available for feedback collection. You can prioritize those feedback based on factors like score, weight and category.

g. Canny

Canny is a good product management tool that collects feedback using multiple integrations. Here, you can track the status of the feedback, vote and merge feedback and assign feedback.

You can view which features are the most requested ones and also can segment filter and segment those feedback for easier prioritization.

h. Product Board

ProductBoard is one of the useful product management tools for product managers and teams striving to build better product.

It makes it simple to record consumer input, find actionable insights, and incorporate the voice of the customer into every stage of the product lifecycle.

i. DronaHQ

DronaHQ is a low code form builder, used by product teams to build various feedback and survey forms. Its drag-and-drop builder simplifies form creation and comes with ready form fields like dropdowns, checkboxes, star ratings, and more making it easy to collect surveys and feedback. Offers integration with business tools like Slack, Google Sheets and more ensuring a smooth workflow.

For enterprise needs, DronaHQ offers white-labeling and unlimited response capture. Set custom actions on form submission for a personalized touch.

5. Design and Wireframing Tools

What is a Wireframing Tool

Wireframes are a low-fidelity visual guide to what an app screen or webpage is going to look like, and they are used in the idea and testing phases of a piece of work in order to get across how something might look or interact.

They’re a great way to get your thoughts across in a simple manner.

Wireframing tools provide a variety of features and functionality to assist designers and developers in quickly creating wireframes. Here are some amazing wireframing tools for you.

a. Visily

Visily is an all-in-one product and app design solution. It helps product teams to create designs, wireframes, prototypes, and diagrams using AI. Using AI users can create designs from screenshots and sketches or diagrams from text prompts. The other features include a massive template library, magic images (helps you find images), magic themes (helps you edit themes) and auto-fill columns.

b. Figma

‍Figma is a tool for collaborative design that enables multiple team members to work on the same project at once. It provides powerful collection of website design capabilities, real-time collaboration, and version control.

c. InVision

InVision is a design and prototyping application that helps product managers in generating interactive prototypes and product design for their efficient funtioning.

You can use this platform without much coding and moreover, it allows you to manage multiple products at the same time.

6. User Experience Testing Tools

Usability is a key concern in all digital products now. It is true that users of all backgrounds are no longer willing to suffer bad usability. Today, terrible usability means a short-lived product. 

Usability or user experience testing tools help you test your prototypes and MVPs. These tools help your customers experience your proposed solution and share feedback to improve it further.

Depending on what your product is, the size of your team, and what you’re trying to accomplish, you’ll choose one tool or the other. But while each of these usability testing tools has its own unique side, they all serve a common purpose: they are here to help you speak the same language as your users.

a. Adobe Target

‍Adobe Target is a rule-based testing and targeting tool that can be integrated with Adobe Analytics to optimize its operation and determine a website’s performance. The cloud solution provides scalable AI-powered testing, personalization, and automation. 

The tool can generate reports that can be used for marketing offers, personalization, and UX testing, allowing the marketing team to determine which offers to make.

b. Hotjar

‍Hotjar operates differently than traditional analytical tools. Rather than providing large sums of numbers, it allows product managers to see how users interact with their products.

It employs interactive heatmaps of user clicks and actions, session recordings, and feedback polls to assist PMs in developing a solid, data-backed understanding of what and how people are doing on the product.

Among the positives of this user testing tool is its data visualization — which has earned massive points with users. It lays down the data in a way that makes it easy to draw insights, with all the right numbers at hand for users.

Another positive point is their educational content. Users receive emails that share important information about the tool and how to use it, while not overwhelming the user’s inbox.

c. UsabilityHub

‍UsabilityHub is a remote user research platform that helps you to swiftly identify design flaws, saving time, effort, and the user’s time. The product management software/tool provides a variety of tests for product management to perform, including first-click tests, design surveys, and preference tests. 

The platform also includes a participant panel of over 170,000 testers.

One of their features, for example, is simplicity in itself: participants are shown a page for 5 seconds. Afterward, they are asked what they remember about the page — all answers are listed. In the end, users have a word cloud with the things participants found most memorable. 

This helps designers adjust the design to make a lasting impression.

Bonus: Advanced heat maps that go beyond simply marking click density. This platform gives information and data along with the heat map, such as time-to-click.

d. Optimizely

‍Optimizely is best known for its A/B testing feature. One of the most attractive traits of this user-testing tool is how easy it is to create new studies. There is no coding needed, as users can set everything up right on their dashboard.

It also allows for some serious segmentation. It allows studies to be narrowed down to participants of certain geographical locations or that have a certain cookie setting, for example. 

One of the best things about this user testing tool is that it was created for big teams that include more than just designers.

Optimizely offers a visual editor for designers, several extensions, APIs, and coding options for developers.

7. Onboarding Tools

Most companies suck at customer support, so there’s a huge opportunity to set yourself apart if you can excel at it.

One way is to proactively help your users through your product so that they can get the value they signed up for as soon as possible. For creating an educational and engaging onboarding tour, we have listed four great tools below.

‍a. Whatfix

‍Whatfix is a multifunctional tool when it comes to round code-free user onboarding and practices. It benefits from building real-time instantaneous walkthroughs that can provide customers with an unusual onboarding experience.

Whatfix also helps in implementing energetic engagement at the time of onboarding and training the users. As an extension to this, Whatfix transforms its walkthroughs automatically to various formats such as annotated videos, articles, slideshows, interactive URLs, and PDFs that can be reused as needed during the user’s lifecycle.

b. Intercom

‍Intercom is a customer messaging and product management software, which is excellent for user engagement. It holds a variety of features that make this platform stand out in the market.

It offers a live chat facility to communicate with the customers that arrive on the website. 

The tool also provides an email, push, and in-app messaging platform to capture and help users. Intercom has a public information center aka knowledge base where users can instantly find solutions to all their doubts.

c. Userlane

‍Userlane is a user onboarding retention and automation platform that also helps with product management. The platform lets you track how users engage with the product onboarding tour which helps gather insights that will help you improve it further.

Userlane is far ahead of those tooltip solutions that only present components in the user interface or recommend pop-ups with instructional knowledge.

d. Inline Manual

‍Inline Manual allows you to build simple tutorials for new users and guide them through your product, so they can find and efficiently use its features to quickly get the value they want.

In addition, the tool allows you to create customer support guide blogs within your app and send support messages so you can proactively answer some of the frequently asked questions.

A must-have product management tool in 2023

A general rule to follow while choosing product management tools for product management is to select the least number of tools necessary to meet the needs of your team. Doing so keeps your product management process lean and efficient.

Wouldn’t it be nice if one tool could take care of all of the above-mentioned use cases? 

Well, there is.

Zeda.io is an all-in-one product management software for product managers to define, manage, and collaborate on their products in one place, making it one of the best product management tools. Start your free trial.

FAQs

1. What are product management tools?

Product management tools are apps that help you develop and manage desirable products throughout their lifecycles. They are also known as product life cycle management tools.

2. What are the must-haves in a product management tools list?

Your product management tools list must contain apps that have multiple functionalities and are versatile. Zeda.io, Slack, and Intercom are some of the top product management tools that belong to that list.

3. What tools are usually used by a product manager?

The best product manager tools are the ones that help gain a quick perspective on the recent changes and ongoing processes. Zeda.io facilitates that by enabling product managers to monitor the product roadmap and track the progress of tasks.

4. What are the 3 major areas of product management?

Discovery, planning, and development are the three major areas of product management.

5. Is Jira a product management tool?

Atlassian’s Jira is a product development management tool that helps developers prioritize feature requests, bug reports, etc., appropriately.

6. What is a product management framework?

Product management frameworks are methodologies and standardized processes that act as a starting point for product teams while building their workflows. RICE, Kano, and MoSCoW are the most commonly used product management frameworks.

7. What are the steps in product management?

Learning about customers’ needs, generating ideas, roadmapping, prioritization of features, delivery, and iteration are the six steps of product management.

8. What is a product roadmap?

A product roadmap is a shared document that details the direction of the product’s growth and brings organizational alignment.

9. What is the difference between a project manager and a product manager?

The product manager guides the development of the product strategically. The project manager oversees the tactical steps for the completion of various projects.

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