What are the must have tools for product managers?

Question

I am consolidating a list of tools which help product managers

Sean Kress · Accepted Answer

I have experimented with many different tools over the years, but I must say that Zenkit simply tops everything. It´s really easy to use and has great teamwork features which just make it really easy to get work done. Just amazing. Keep it up guys!

Eric Ang · Answer

I would recommend Zenkit. As a product manager, you will need different tools to accomplish your task - todo, project management, gantt chart, mind map, excel spreadsheets... zenkit provides you everything under one roof and you can easily link up between these tools.

Kavir Kaycee · Answer

Google Sheets and Google Docs - great for collaborative document editing!

Christoph Janz · Answer

Lets you search and organize all your customer feedback in one place.

Jeroen Corthout ☕ · Answer

Great product. Easy to use and beautiful. Love it. Had coffee with the founder recently too: https://blog.salesflare.com/hubert-palan-productboard-1a8e72f3b339

thomas ross · Answer

I don't know if you're working in an 'agile' environment but Pivotal Tracker is a simple collaborative tool which is great for creating and tracking feature requests or monitoring bugs.

Trifon Tsvetkov · Answer

Good overview of what the whole team is doing. Lets you include freelancers and contractors into your team without creating accounts for them. Also integrates with email and slack so you don't have to switch between apps all the time. Simple and free.

Hannah White · Answer

I would recommend trying out a platform like Tonkean.

It pulls all of your favorite business tools into once place (like most dashboards), PLUS adds your teams context to it (unlike other dashboards).

The most appealing factor is that your team doesn't even need to change their workflow. Tonkean's AI-powered chatbot reaches out to the owners you've assigned for status updates through their favorite communication tools (Slack, Teams or email). Then, based on their response, either updates the information in your dashboard (and by association your other tools) or just publishes the context that you need for the initiative you're tracking.

There's a few examples of how product/project teams have been using the platform, available here: https://tonkean.com/templates/

Maéva Alméras · Answer

I suppose TMetric is a must-have tool for product managers, as it helps to track time during the working progress and estimate time for tasks.

$rikanth.¥.$. · Answer

I have used Slack at my current org. It’s truly a cross-functional team collaboration tool.! 🔝⚒ 2️⃣ 🚢

Lisa Dziuba · Answer

Perfect for tasks management in a startup team!

Zachary Martin · Answer

After months of closely examining the freelance marketplace, and the industry's inability to quickly get tech and web development micro-tasks done, it's really exciting to see the launch of www.Joule.ai. This is a great tool for product managers as it allows for them to get micro-tasks done without all the hassle.

General sentiments regarding the current freelance marketplace incumbents (Upwork, Fiverr, etc.) and the industry as a whole are quite negative. Go to Reddit and search topics such as "freelance" to see the attitudes people currently have. Check out some of the support tickets that Upwork posts on its Twitter account. It's not good, to say the least.

Joule really did its research when it came to discovering what customers wanted and how a platform could help people get tech tasks done more quickly and simply.

We're looking forward to seeing how Joule will revolutionize the freelance marketplace and hope you do too!

Joe Thomas · Answer

Record analytic dashboard insights to record with team, design feedback, and bug reporting.

Tejas Kinger · Answer

I'd suggest Trello over Asana if you prefer a Kanban style view of tasks that you need to manage across your team.

Salah Ait Mokhtar · Answer

easy to use live chat solution!

haabe · Answer

Automatically tracks your day, from what tools you use to which websites you've visited - and for how long. Timely combines it with a super-easy and slick UI.

Augusto Carmo · Answer

You can organize everythig!

Lisa Dziuba · Answer

For time tracking.

Pavel Kukhnavets · Answer

I vote for the platform for growing companies-  Hygger.io (https://hygger.io/ ) as the service provides the full range of options that product managers need: from friendly Kanban boards to the clear roadmap and the tool for prioritization features (the backlog priority chart).

Alex Barrera · Answer

Pretty obvious for any developer, but it also works well for docs and other share resources of a team

John Tan · Answer

Switched from Trello to favro at work for our product/marketing/dev teams. It allows for way more flexibility in creating backlogs and boards to accomodate for multiple processes from Scrum to Kanban to Agile, with very specific tools to manage them. Favro is what trello could have been, but never became.

Askar · Answer

I was blown away by the versatility of this tool. It can be tailored to fit many needs and is pretty much an open database with an Excel kind of UI to it, that's out on the cloud.

Nils Davis · Answer

Constant market discovery - i.e., talking to customers and the market - is one of the most valuable things product managers can do. But we've never had a good tool for gathering and making use of all the data we collect. Productboard provides that tool. Finally, we have an assistant for helping detect the weak signal of important market problems, for which we can create successful solutions.

André Pimenta · Answer

It helps to manage mental fatigue and effort. It allows non-invasive real-time fatigue management, which can be useful for detecting problems with the team (burnout or lack of motivation), but allows to see if the workload is the most adequate or to do a task management in a way reduce wear and increase productivity (People Analytics).

Julius Šakalys · Answer

I've been using this daily to manage the work of others and my own. Pretty happy with the simplicity of it.

Kylian le Mette · Answer

Perfect for product and Feedback !

Matt Lovato · Answer

It combines Trello, Asana, Slack, and your team file-sharing tool of choice all under one roof. Dead simple to get started, super powerful, and actually fun to use.

Georg Petschnigg · Answer

Don't waste time making decks, get your team on the same page, build and illustrate a vision together. Paste is a new type of presentation tools built for Slack and mobile. It builds slides for you and is collaborative to the core. It also integrates directly with others tools like Sketch, Figma, Trello, Sheets, Google Docs, and more.

Daniel Carvalho · Answer

Really helpful application. Its helps me focus giving me real-time notifications about my fatigue, telling me the to take breaks exactly when I'm getting tired and distracted.

Answer

Taking a break (in the right time) is always a good ideia! Give people a break and you’ll get more from them :-)

Diogo Maia Caetano · Answer

Performetric is a great software! The fact that I'm able to see my fatigue analysis without leaving the webpage I'm in it's a game changer for my work performance. In one second I get to know my fatigue status.

Alptekin · Answer

Atina is a project management tool which can be customized according to your teams needs. It eliminates every teams task management problem with its process sharing & tracking, deadline, and comment features.

Nicolas Mondada · Answer

Great tool for roadmapping and collecting feedback!

Nicolas Mondada · Answer

Great tool for roadmapping and collecting feedback!

Matt Hamilton · Answer

Gotta have a tool for wireframing if you work on anything with a UI.

Aaron Green · Answer

Streamtime replaces timesheets with smart To Do lists and project planning and scheduling is a breeze with their award winning UI and UX.

Marcel Folaron · Answer

With Leantime you can manage the entire product development life cycle from research to ideation, roadmap planning and tracking.

Michael Nguyen · Answer

Asana has boards view and allows you to have a tasks in multiple projects making it very easy to always have a single source of truth.

Answer

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Gabriela Araujo Zampino · Answer

Super useful!

Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia · Answer

Super handy tool that is a little bit deeper than a spreadsheet with real power to use and organize data, but still not so complicated that you need a masters in engineering to be able to use it!

Matthew Lawrence · Answer

My suggestion is to checkout out Paperform - it's a great way for product managers to stay on top of their product. Highly recommened.

Roger Lu · Answer

Taskade lets you easily create lists of tasks, like a task list for a meeting, a task list for a project, things you need to do this week, today’s tasks and so on. You can start a task list with a blank sheet or one of many ready-made templates can be selected. It's simple, collaborative, with integrated messaging and video chat.

Templates are basically empty lists that have been formatted and organised so you just have to fill in the blanks. A weekly task list has entries for every day of the week for example. This is a nice feature and it saves some a little time and effort and helps you to stay organised. There are many examples and use cases on www.taskade.com/templates

Dan Makarov · Answer

Can save a ton of time on bug reporting and fixing

Matthias Kentzia · Answer

Lots of great little benefits, but what really makes Slack stand out is the almost limitless integrations you can out together.

Tejas Kinger · Answer

The best tool for team communication, threaded communication, and chat.

Leo Zakour · Answer

Project management tool powerful for product teams yet simple and beautiful.

Sam Rye · Answer

I quite like how lightweight Roadmap is for quickly creating visual overviews of product development, as well as managing team capacity. Definitely worth a look.

Answer

The control of competitive products and marketing is one of the most important capabilities of the product manager. SocialPeta is a device that helps product managers to track competitive products and formulate marketing strategies. SocialPeta has the largest number of advertising materials and APP data in the world, and you can use it to track your competitors. Search the hottest ads on each of the big platforms to help you better improve your product.

Sam Rye · Answer

Another Roadmap product which helps you gather customer feedback and share publicly or privately. This one is more like Uservoice which imho has become an over-priced mess of features and UI.

Fave features:
- Ability to gather all customer feedback in one place, then convert it into stories, and share the releases
- Public sharing which enables voting
- Dashboard view to keep track of everything at a glance
- Nice UI

Answer

With ProofHub, your teams, clients and all the project communication stays in one place. There's no need of investing in too many different tools to run your business. This project management software makes it easy to create plans, collaborate with teams and clients, keep things organized and deliver projects on time.

Stefan Link · Answer

Simply because awesome concept of enabling every product team with the right toolset in an all-in-one solution to boost their product innovation with design thinking principles.

Answer

like it or not, you can't live without it as a PM

Kesava Mandiga · Answer

A product roadmap tool that stands out for its simplicity and intuitive flow. Map your project the way you think of it, as a series of steps.

Timelinr · Answer

Timelinr lets you plan at both macro and micro levels in one easy to use app. Our Timelines give your stakeholders, team, clients, a fantastic overview of your project and product roadmap.

And did I mention it's dead easy to use?

Daniel Wilkinson · Answer

The only must is reliable  project management software  which can perform various tasks. I use Comindware Project (Project Management Software - Comindware Project) where I organize complete monitoring over the projects execution: set times deadlines, communicate with the team and clients, share documents etc.

Sam Rye · Answer

I'd suggest Favro if you're working in a larger team, and want to minimise overhead of reporting progress across multiple teams or projects...

Yuval J. Pecht · Answer

The next evolution up from Trello - when you REALLY need to track features...

Paul Bleicher · Answer

Allows you to make better product decisions. 
Centralize and organize all your customers' feedback in one single place. 
Prioritize feature requests and improve product roadmap.

Kirill Maximov · Answer

This is a swiss-army tool, focused on effective work using the keyboard.

Good for:

- lightweight project management with collaboration (assignments, due dates, tags, priorities)
- complex task outlining
- research, collecting notes
- checklists for typical procedures, like releasing a product
- keeping a list of clients with next actions for each of them

All in one.

Tristan Harward · Answer

Appcues lets you make great in-product onboarding and feature announcements to help teach your users how to use your product, and make sure they know what’s new and great. It’s easy to use and it offloads this whole problem space from your design and engineering teams so they can focus on what matters: your product.

Kirill Maximov · Answer

A most difficult task is to build the right product. Lean methodology and lean canvas really help with it.

Bas Wakker · Answer

Best tool for creating a simple, understandable and flexible planning

arina_kayea · Answer

For time tracking and task management

Marcin Krzywonos · Answer

Working on many project requires lots of resources to deal with. That app makes it painless.

Tejas Kinger · Answer

Possibly THE tool a product manager would need. The best tool to manage and view your product roadmap.

Paul Zogmann · Answer

Powerful product management tool for managing backlog, epics, story mapping and customer feedback. Really easy to use with a lot of functionality.

Monika Ciam · Answer

IC Project is pretty new tool, so is not very popular, but is great. Is ease of use and confident functionality. If you want you can try it for free. It allows the user to create plans and task groups as part of products. Task groups are divided into Kanban cards. During work, it is possible to evaluate progress and incurred costs of the project in a clear layout. Functionalities: 
✔️Project Management 
✔️Tasks 
✔️Calendar 
✔️Monitoring and control 
✔️Resource management 
✔️Kanban cards
 IC Project has many more options than you can expect, managing contractors, communicator, setting projects, tasks, reporting time are just some of the features. Important advantages of the system are simplicity and its complexity. IC Project is a great tool to manage your company.

Mike · Answer

For almost a year we use only IC Project.

It’s very easy to use, you can colaborate with your team and with your clients. You don’t need some extra solutions for communication.

For us IC Projet is best:

for base organization, 
for task management, 
for team communication, 
for clients, 
with Google Docs for content and spreadsheets, 
integration with Google Drive for files, 
for time tracking/logging

From a week ago we have a brand new functionality - tickets. Our client have access to create a new ticket and we have one click to create a task from.

Besides IC Project looks gorgeous.

Maurivan Luiz · Answer

Awesome tool ;)

Tamas Abraham · Answer

As submitted before: Asana and Google sheets are the true essentials IMO but I find Workflowy also to be an invaluable tool for planning.

Allan Caeg · Answer

As a product manager working with a 100% remote team, capturing and sharing my screen is key.

GIFs, videos, and jpegs. Annotations.

bazingagag · Answer

Mobile security is more and more important nowadays, that’s why I think no matter who you are, what you do. You will need an app to protect your phone!

I am using this app called ‘AppLock’, which is amazing because it can lock all of my apps, images even videos. This app is always on my list when it comes to app recommendation.

The one thing that I like the most about this app is that it can take photos of the person who’s trying to unlock your phone! This feature is really funny because I always got the intruder selfie notification from my kids. They are trying really hard to unlock my phone for video games.

If you are a cautious people, you really do need one of this app.

Answer

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Cedric Pimenta · Answer

While working, it is very easy to get too focus and miss the importance of taking a break and clearing my thoughts. Performetric has been a life saver, helping me develop way healthier habits, so I can be at my best throughout the day.