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Originally Posted On: https://www.techdee.com/tools-for-product-managers/

 

The number of companies hiring product managers is increasing, with 43% of companies hiring more PMs due to product-led growth. This unique career opportunity expects individuals to connect with their customers and develop effective strategies. As a product manager, you are able to speak for the customer while keeping the development and business goals of the organization in mind.

The “ideal” product manager will have the necessary skills and knowledge to communicate effectively with and manage their team. Having the right software suite can help make the job easier. In addition to being able to map out a strategy and keep track of the progress of the product, the right software can also help you gather insight into the competition and the customers.

“A product manager is only as good as their suite of tools” — Mallory Busch, Sr. Content Marketing Manager @ Amplitude

Most product managers use a variety of tools to accomplish their tasks. The key to choosing the right software is to create a product stack designed to meet each task’s needs. Let’s observe nine tools that may seem uncommon but are worth giving a chance as they’ve already gained some good feedback from professional PMs.

Finteza

Trial and error is part of product management. Because of it, you need to track the visitors to your website and know how they interact with your website and product information.

If you wish to try something new to track web visitors, you can explore Finteza. The way it helps track visitors on the website makes it even easy for you to get customer feedback without asking the visitors directly.

Additionally, this web analytics tool helps you with payment management and advertising. That is why this one is worth checking if you want to manage various aspects of the product launch or promotion through a single interface.

Since the tool allows you to track visitors through the various stages of the sales funnel and analyze the audience, it becomes easy for the product manager to manage the products and accordingly improve not just the product but also the marketing campaign.

“I like Finteza for one main reason: It places the quality of your site traffic before quantity. You may have 100,000 visitors every month, but what if they are all from bots? <…>” — Shane Barker, digital marketing consultant @ shanebarker.com

ProductPlan

ProductPlan is a roadmap software designed for creating and launching new products.

With the help of drag-and-drop building, it is easy for you to create a roadmap. Not only that, but since it allows you to create unlimited roadmaps, it is easy to integrate various teams.

It means that the development team can communicate pretty well with the marketing team. Since everyone will be on the same page, it becomes easy to follow the deadlines. If you want to make your products successful and launch them on time, you shouldn’t ignore this tool.

“We started using ProductPlan about 2 years ago when we were seriously looking for software that would make product management and road mapping easy and collaborative. It has been excellent in these regards.” — Taken from review @ Gartner.com 

Split

A split is a tool that allows you to work on the features which are a problem or need improvement. This interface makes it easy to improve your tool and deploy it to the customers in less time.

You can integrate your entire product team through this product flagging tool. Additionally, it offers AV tests, making it easy to test various features and gain customer feedback.

You can easily pull the plug on the features if the users do not like the features or if it results in more problems. You can assign various features based on the metrics and the goals, making it easy to decide about new features while launching a tool or product.

Thus, this platform can save you time and leapfrog the development process if you’re dealing with digital tools or products.

“The Split team has been so accommodating throughout our relationship that started earlier this year. I was working against a really tight timeline to get experimentation up and running and the Split team worked closely with myself and my team in order to successfully achieve this.” — Gina B., Product Lead

Pitch

Pitch allows you to communicate with various stakeholders simultaneously. This platform allows you to propagate your product vision, plans, and strategies with your teams and prospective clients

It allows you to create visually appealing presentations and integrate them with various other tools. Thus, this is not only a collaboration platform but also helps you pitch your product to various stakeholders, making getting approvals and new customers easier.

“With Pitch, the joy of making presentations is getting me more motivation to even start. Unlike seasoned apps such as MS PP, Pitch helps me get started without staring at a blank screen for minutes.” — Taken from review @ Capterra.com 

ChartMogul

Professional product managers need to keep a stricter watch on the revenue and earnings from the product. Specially, you need to take into account the repeat customers or the subscription-based revenue. However, it is not that easy to manually track the recurring revenue.

That is why most professional product managers use a tool like ChartMogul. The tool allows you to track the net cash flow and MRR from various payment processors. That way, in a single glance, you will know whether the overall subscription revenue is increasing or not.

“I couldn’t be happier. Though ChartMogul is not a billing platform like Zuora or SaaSOptics, it definitely does the analytics part extremely well.” — Taken from review @ Capterra.com

Ghost Inspector

When launching a digital product, testing every feature is necessary. However, this testing shouldn’t be limited to only the technical testers. Most professional product managers use Ghost inspector to facilitate everyone to test the product and provide feedback.

The tool ensures that cordless automation testing can be done as well. Not only that, the features can be tested from the user’s point of view. Because of the same, it becomes easier for product managers, test users, and even developers to test the product. That way, improving the product certainly becomes easier.

“As a non-technical person, I am able to record tests without writing a single line of code and I am able to modify the steps to be reusable” — Taken from review @ Capterra.com

Figma

Figma is a tool that is often used by product managers to not only brainstorm ideas but ensure that the design process is accelerated.

It provides numerous interfaces to interact with the various members of different teams. For example, you can create an online whiteboard through which you can set up sticky notes, diagrams, and workshops. That way, keeping everyone on the same page is possible and easy.

Additionally, with the help of a side-by-side interface, it is easy for you to share ideas and track them up to the execution. This platform also allows product managers to test various features and share feedback.

The prototypes, sketches, and mockups this platform can help you create as a product manager make it a must-to-use tool to save a lot of time in the product management and launch process.

“Figma is, without a doubt, the best value for money at this moment in time, especially if you and/or your team is taking designs seriously by branching, testing, creating design systems, and also leveraging both synchronous and asynchronous work as needed.” — Daniel Schwarz @ Creativebloq.com

Slack

Many of the tools highlighted on this list will allow you to communicate with your team members. However, most of them provide you with a passive communication channel. You will have to wait for the other team member to come online to get a reply.

In many cases, especially during the deployment or the product launch, you need even faster communication. In that case, you need a platform that can provide you with almost instantaneous communication.

Slack facilitates that, and that is why most professional product managers use it.

“I liked the style, functionality, and availability of slack for everything and everyone. It is completely easy and fun to use and manage as well have many useful features.” — Taken from review @ Capterra.com

Walkme

No list of online tools used by professional product managers is complete without an onboarding tool. If you do not have a robust onboarding process, it will become very difficult for you to make the customers use your products.

The small digital experience that such a platform provides you with makes it easy for you to explain the features to new users.

The no-code nature of this platform means that even if you do not have programming or coding knowledge, it is easy for you to onboard the users.

Additionally, since it lets you know the chokepoints, it is easy for you to take actions to fix those and provide an even more seamless experience to the users.

Thus, if you want to onboard users in a seamless fashion like most professional product managers, you shouldn’t ignore this platform.

“The WalkMe interactive digital walk-throughs made it extremely simple for customers to learn the ins and outs of our platform without our support team getting engaged. This software saved our support team significant time and energy!” — Taken from review @ Capterra.com

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