Product managers face an ever-evolving industry – and the same is true for the product management tools they use to support the process.
If you’re in the business of researching, creating, developing, and rolling out brand-spanking new products, you need to be up-to-date on both your industry and tools.
If there is a new tool that can radically speed up your product process or a better way of managing your resources, well… you’re going to want to know about it right?
Product management is looking, well… incredible. For an area that moves super fast, there is so much to look forward to and exciting in the months ahead.
Generative AI goes mainstream. Led by advancements in products like ChatGPT, Claude, Bard, and more, teams will integrate generative AI into their existing products to enhance the user experience at a faster pace next year. As these assistants grow more intelligent over time, they will change user expectations for how software should interact and assist them. Product managers will need to be up for the challenge of creating value-add assistants, not just me-too assistants
As we head into this year with headlines dominated by AI, increasing value, simplicity, and measurements of success, it’s looking like a vintage year for all things product management.
And product management tools, well, tools are going to be at the heart of it all.
Awesome Product Management Tools
What are the best product management tools?
tl;dv
tl;dv is the ULTIMATE in product management tools. This smart video conferencing recorder allows you to easily record and watch videos of your team’s product management meetings. tl;dv automatically transcribes the meeting, and captures notes and action items. This means that every planning session, whether super in-depth or a quick sync, has total documentation so no point, plan, or idea gets lost.
tl;dv also allows for collaboration between teams in geographically dispersed locations, so everyone can be a part of the conversation. Working across departments or with remote teams has never been easier, thanks to the streamlined async collaboration that comes when you use our platform.
Both these points mean that tl;dv as a product manager tool allows for total accessibility and inclusivity, ensuring a truly democratized process. By amplifying the voices of users across your organization, incorporating their insights into product roadmaps is made straightforward.
Pro: Streamlined async collaboration WITH incredible AI-driven insights. Wooo!
Free Tier: Yes, and the upgrade price is from $20 per user/per month
June.so
June.so is all about data, data, data, and, oh yes, more data. B2B analytics, from market trends to customer segmentation, can be found here. It can also be sent straight into your Slack channel too.
June is a great tool for getting insights into the product and understanding how it is performing in the marketplace. This dashboard covers all the insights you could need, and maybe a few more as well.
Simple to read, easy to digest, and with incredible granular insights, June offers analysis and insight into all aspects of the product.
Pro: Analyze and understand customer segmentation, market trends, and more.
Con: Limited ability to customize the dashboard.
Free Tier: Yes, and the upgrade price starts from $149/per month
ProductBoard
ProductBoard is a product management tool that helps you prioritize features and make decisions with data. It includes user research, market trends, and usage analytics in one place so you can easily access any information needed to create better products.
ProductBoard also helps you visualize your roadmap as well as collaborate more effectively with stakeholders across departments.
Pros: Lot of great features and constantly being updated with user requests
Cons: There are limited export facilities
Free Tier: Yes, and the upgrade price is from $20 per user/per month
canny.io
Feedback can make or break any product, and canny.io is the tool that is going to not only help you collect it all but keep it organized and show you what needs to be done to make things even better.
Canny can provide you with a bird’s eye view of the customer experience, helping you understand the most pressing issues and what features your team needs to prioritize.
Pro: Get user feedback quickly and easily
Con: Notifications can be hard to customize
Free Tier: Yes, and the upgrade price is from $79 per month.
cello.so
cello.so means that referrals can be a total breeze. This referral automation tool is the perfect way to scale your product and reach new audiences. The easy-to-use customer acquisition platform lets you track referrals, customize campaigns (complete with automagically generated landing pages for total visibility), and reward advocates for sharing your product.
This means you can easily track who referred who and incentivize customer loyalty with rewards in the form of discounts and points. It also works directly with platforms such as Stripe, and CRM systems and makes it absolutely crystal clear what your ROI is.
As well as sharing love for your product in the old school way (word of mouth) with a new school flavor, there’s also the chance to share profits as well!
Turn your product fans into product obsessives by sharing profits with these folks. Implementing a system like this can unlock a growth channel for your product in days and not months.
Oh, and if that wasnt enough cello makes it crazy easy to implement, and without a lot of engineering overhead.
What’s that? Your product at full steam ahead. CHOO CHOO!
Pro: Track and reward customers who refer others to your product
Con: Limited customization options
Free Tier: Yes, and the upgrade price is from €350/per month
Zapier.com
We genuinely wonder how much would get done throughout the world without Zapier! Zaps are life. For those who don’t know Zapier gives product managers the chance to easily connect different web applications and services. This helps streamline workflows, automate tasks, and keep track of all the moving parts in your product management strategy.
With Zapier’s intuitive interface, you can quickly create powerful integrations that will save you time and make your job easier. Create whole workflows and action points that make the whole process of product creation and roll out that little bit easier.
Pro: Automates tasks and streamlines workflows
Con: Doesn’t integrate with everything, so sometimes you have to find complex workarounds for particular tasks
Free Tier: Yes, and the upgrade cost is $19.99 for 750 tasks/zaps per month
Pivotal Tracker
Pivotal Tracker is a powerful agile project management tool that helps product managers organize their projects into small pieces so they can track progress more easily. It also allows teams to break down tasks into smaller chunks and assign them across multiple teams.
Additionally, Pivotal Tracker offers features such as automated alerts and custom reports that make it easier to stay on top of deadlines and tasks.
Pro: Super simple to see the status of things
Con: Very geared up towards developers
Free Tier: Yes, and the upgrade price starts from $10/per month for up to 10 collaborators
Softr.io
No code, no worries! Softr is a powerful tool for building user interfaces for websites and apps faster than ever before. Softr allows developers and designers to collaborate on creating products with its drag-and-drop UI builder at a fraction of the time it would normally take to build an app from scratch.
It also offers a range of features such as auto-generated code, automated testing tools, and analytics to help you understand how users are interacting with your product. It helps you to create MVPs quickly and efficiently, meaning you can get your product to market faster.
Pro: Codeless design for non-techy types
Con: Despite super simplicity, it can still take a little time to learn
Free Tier: Yes, and the upgrade price is $59 per month ($49 if paid annually) with a free 30-day trial
Airfocus
Airfocus is the ultimate in-product planning tool. It helps product managers prioritize tasks, visualize their roadmap, and plan long-term objectives. With Airfocus, you can easily gather data from user feedback, market trends, and usage analytics to make informed decisions about upcoming features and improvements.
Best of all, its intuitive interface makes it easy to use regardless of your experience level.
Pro: Super slick and easy to use UI
Con: With more complex projects the simple user interface can start to get a bit cluttered and tricky to maintain
Free Tier: Kind of, there is a free 14-day trial for all plans. The entry-level price is $69 per month.
Monday
Monday can help keep track of progress on all aspects of a project, from design to development to marketing. This tool helps teams track tasks while also providing an overview of who’s working on what, and when things need to happen.
Additionally, Monday offers an array of features such as automated workflows, real time reports, and integrations with other tools.
You can split projects into different areas, create master dashboards, and create systems to mark tasks throughout the progress of the project. It also stores documents and details for quick reference as well.
Pro: Everything at a glance, it’s easy to see the status and move things along in the process
Con: Relies heavily on manual updating and people to remember to do things
Free Tier: Yes, going up to the Basic plan is $8 per user/per month
Trello
Trello is one of the most popular product management tools out there. It’s an online Kanban-style project tracking system that helps you organize tasks in a visually appealing way. With Trello, you can easily assign tasks to specific teams or individuals and set deadlines for completion. Plus, its collaborative features allow your entire team to stay on top of what needs to be done.
Trello allows you to make things as complex, or as simple, as you like. Finish a task and update and tag colleagues, or even just drag it across the project boards to “Complete”.
Pro: Easy to use Kanban board
Con: The Kanban style could mean a more complex project is hard to display easily
Free Tier: Yes, and the upgrade price is from $5 per user/per month
Contentful
Contentful is a content management platform (CMS) that provides product managers with an easy-to-use, cloud-based system to create, store, and deploy content across multiple channels.
Contentful allows teams to maintain control over their content while giving them the freedom to quickly make changes and updates in one central place. There’s no need to create a whole backend from scratch, Contentful can literally give you a quick and easy way to get content out to sites and apps in a flash.
Pro: Cloud-based system makes it super accessible
Cons: Can be more expensive than some other CMS options if you have a small team
Free Tier: Yes, and the upgrade price is from $300/per month
Geckoboard
Geckoboard is a business intelligence and performance tracking platform which offers easy-to-understand visual dashboards, real time data updates, metrics reporting, and more. It helps product teams stay on top of their performance goals and make informed decisions quickly.
It’s incredibly useful for tracking KPIs and is one way of keeping all your numbers together in a super easy-to-digest format. Even better, it integrates with Slack too!
Pro: Clear metrics reporting to track progress against goals
Con: For bigger projects and teams it can get very pricey very quickly
Free Tier: Yes, with the next plan coming in at $39 per month for a single dashboard and three users, billed annually
Dopt
We ❤️ Dopt!!! Onboarding can be made super duper simple, seamless, and most importantly automated!
Product led growth companies need a fast and fun way to get new users activated. Those early days of engagement are key to making sure that customers fall in love, have their AHA moment, and stay faithful.
Tipped as the Operating System for Customer Onboarding, you’ll no longer have to keep nagging your engineering team constantly for tweaks and adjustments.
Dopt allows you to get new customers on, get them up-running, and before you know it, upgraded to Pro.
Pro: Your ultimate onboarding super power system
Con: It’s a relatively newish venture, so there’s not incredibly well-known… however, we do love a bit of an early adopter status
Free Tier: Yes! Up to 1,000 monthly tracked users. Next level is Growth $299 per month.
Intercom
Intercom is a customer communication platform that helps product teams connect with their users and customers in real time. It also allows teams to collect valuable data on user behavior, track customer interactions, and gather feedback to help improve the overall experience.
While it can be super handy for customer success, customer service, and gaining clear details for marketing and outreach, it’s incredibly helpful as a part of the research and development process. You can use it to get user feedback on products, features, and design changes.
Pro: Connects product teams with users and customers for super accurate feedback
Con: Requires a lot of setup and hands-on maintenance
Free Tier: There is a free trial and then a plan of $39 per seat/per month (billed annually) for small businesses. This then creeps up to $99 per seat / per month, topping out at $139 per seat/per month.
Confluence
Confluence is an all-in-one collaboration platform for product managers. It allows teams to create, organize and share information in one central space.
This platform offers features such as project tracking, task management, document sharing, and wikis that make it easier for teams to be productive and efficient.
Pro: Super easy to organize everything between all parties
Con: Slack integration can be a bit laggy
Free Tier: Yes, and the upgrade price is from $6.05 per user/per month
Asana
Asana is a popular project management tool for product managers. It helps you keep track of tasks, organize projects, collaborate with teammates, optimize workflow processes, and set deadlines for completion. Plus, its powerful automation capabilities allow you to streamline workflows so your team can move faster and achieve success more quickly.
Pro: Incredibly easy to use and well recognized
Con: Arguably too many features. This could be viewed as a pro more than a con, but sometimes the overwhelm from options can lead to process issues
Free Tier: Yes, and the upgrade price is from $10.99 per user/per month
Gartner Product Decision
Gartner is an invaluable source of data and insights. With Gartner’s Product Decisions Tool, you’ll have the power (and ALL the market info) to make quick and informed decisions to stay ahead of the competition in an ever-changing environment.
The tool brings together Gartner’s renowned buyer data, with analysts’ knowledge of what purchasers need and the features offered for over 100 markets, which can help you set up a product strategy that will drive your roadmap.
Pro: Supercharged, comprehensive market intelligence data
Con: Can be incredibly expensive
Free Tier: Not that we are aware of. The tool is part of a larger package and requires a demo to get pricing
Arcade
While we would absolutely love to tell you that this amazing tool is actually an excuse to play Pac-Man all day (
), it’s actually something much, MUCH better.
Arcade allows product managers, and their crew, to create awesome, interactive demos.
Interactivity totally levels up the experience of testing and feedback. Allowing end-users the chance to be totally engaged wins extra, mega high scores from us. As users explore your product they’ll be able to know right away why it’s absolutely the right choice for their needs.
Pro: Interactivity will always win the day!
Con: If you’re not offering something that is interactive then it won’t probably be of any use to you
Free Tier: Yesiree. There is a free taster tear, heading up to $32 per month for individual users. More than one user you’ll need to drop them a line to get more detailed pricing
Split.io
Split.io is a feature management platform that enables product managers to quickly and easily deploy, manage, and test their features on any web or mobile application. Its cloud-based solution allows for experimentation in real time, giving product teams the insights they need to make informed decisions about their products’ features.
Pro: Enables real time experimentation
Con: There is a learning curve with this, as it offers so much data it can be hard to get your head around at first
Free Tier: Yes for up to 10 seats. The next level is $33 per user/per month
Lucidchart
Road maps, flow charts, and all sorts of lovely visuals. Lucidchart is EXCELLENT for creating a really clear visual representation of processes, plans, and more.
Lucidchart is an incredibly visual workspace that combines diagramming, data visualization, and collaboration to accelerate understanding and drive innovation. This platform helps product managers share their ideas with teams in an easy-to-understand format.
Pro: Physically and visually plan out workflows
Con: You need to be visual to get the visual, so while useful to show people it can be hard to use if you’re not design-savvy
Free Tier: Yes, and then the paid-for levels start at $7.95 per month.
The Ultimate Guide to Product Management Tools
It can be hard to choose the right product manager tools for your team, especially when they all come with a hefty price tag. But don’t worry – if you just pick the most expensive one, it’s sure to have the best features! (Just kidding!) However, the list above includes some of the best and some tools you may not even have heard of.
And while this list is geared toward product management, UX research, and design, many other departments such as marketing, sales, and customer service can benefit from it. Researching the features of each will help you make the best decision for your team and ensure that you are up-to-date on the latest trends and technologies.
So if development is the name of the game, make sure you check out these awesome tools and don’t forget to give tl;dv a try as well!
