It is not wrong to say that the goal of the entire process of Product Management is Customer Satisfaction by providing them the products that suit their requirements and fulfill their expectations. Product managers’ role is to look after an entire product or service within an organization.

Product Management includes multiple responsibilities like setting the product vision, making product development plans, creating product roadmaps, collecting product feedback, and taking action on it. And product managers use various types of Product Management software and tools to fulfill these responsibilities.

If you are one of them looking for some great tools to make your work and life easier and carry on your responsibilities effectively, this article is for you! In this article, we will explore some of the best Product Management tools that you can use to carry out various tasks and make your job easier and more effective.

Let’s learn more about these tools.

1. Zonka Feedback - Customer Survey Software for Product Feedback

Customer Feedback is crucial for every business. And when you are into product management, it becomes necessary to collect product feedback from your customers so that you can innovate, develop, modify, and launch products accordingly. Zonka Feedback is what you can use for this purpose.

It is a product feedback tool and experience management platform that enables you to conduct all types of surveys. Whether you want to measure customer satisfaction with the overall product, or a particular product feature, or you want to take suggestions from your users; Zonka Feedback enables you to do all. Here are some of the key features of this product management tool.

Key Features

• Create customized surveys and Whitelabel them to add your own branding, colors, theme, and style.
• Hundreds of ready-to-use templates to create various types of surveys
• Use metric surveys like NPS, CSAT, and CES surveys to collect product feedback and measure customer loyalty, satisfaction, and perceived efforts.
• Collect feedback across multiple channels. You can share surveys through emails, SMS, website, Android tablets, and smartphones.
• Use feedback buttons, survey links, popups, and embedded surveys on your website to collect product feedback without disturbing your users.
• Create Multilingual surveys for your customers of different backgrounds, use among 30+ languages to create surveys.
• Do Smart targeting and feedback distribution. You can send surveys to the customers as per their persona and customer journey, manage your surveys, set automatic triggers to send surveys at specific timings, and control  survey frequency to avoid sending too many surveys
• Use automated workflows and integrations to make your tasks easier.
• Real-time feedback alerts to take action on the feedback at the right time and close the feedback loop effectively.
• Automatic follow-up emails to apologize for negative feedback and thank for the positive feedback.

Pricing

It offers multiple plans.

• Professional plan costs $79/month
• Growth plan costs $169/month
• Enterprise plan costs 429/month
• Custom plan at customized prices as per business requirements.

Zonka Feedback offers a free plan and a free trial for 15 days.

2. ProductPlan - Product Roadmapping Software

ProductPlan is a product management roadmap tool where you can do product roadmapping to align your teams with the vision, direction, priorities, development, and progress of the product over time. If you want to plan your actions and align your teams as per your product plans, this is the right platform for you.

Key Features

• Create customized roadmaps within a matter of a few clicks and share them with your teams.
• Simple Drag and Drop Builder enables to easily build visual roadmaps.
• Customizable Layouts enable you to represent your product roadmaps in various forms like list, timeline, table, or portfolio layout.
• You can create and share an unlimited number of roadmaps and share access with unlimited viewers to view and provide feedback on the roadmap.
• You can publish your product roadmap with a secure private link to coordinate with external stakeholders.
• Offers integrations and API to enable custom integrations with other tools
• SOC2 Certification and advanced security features to ensure the safety of your data.

Pricing

It offers three plans:

• Basic plan costs $39/month per editor
• Professional plan costs $69/month per editor
• Enterprise plan includes custom plans as per your business requirements.

It also offers a free trial for 14 days.

3. Visio - Flowcharting Tool

Creating a customer journey map is a great way to have a crystal clear view of your customers’ complete experience with your business. Visio is one of the flowcharting tools that help you create customer journey maps to have a view of all the touchpoints your customers had in their journey beginning from coming in contact with your sales representative to buying and using your product.

This helps to better understand your customers and serve them in a better way. With Visio, you can create professional diagrams anytime, anywhere.

Key features

• Dozens of prebuilt templates, starter diagrams, and stencils to choose from in Visio Desktop and the web app.
• You can view data-connected business process flows with a host of integrated features of Microsoft 365.
• You can create, edit, view, and coordinate regarding Visio diagrams from Microsoft Teams.
• Supports various Accessibility features like Narrator, Accessibility checker, and high-contrast support to make Visio diagrams accessible for everyone.
• High-end security and privacy with all security features of Microsoft 365 apps including Information Right Management.
• Provides Visio web app and Visio desktop app, you can choose as per your business requirements. Visio Desktop app is available only with Plan 2.

Pricing

It offers two plans:

• Visio Plan 1 costs $5/month per user.
• Visio Plan 2 costs $15/month per user.

You can also go for a one-time purchase, and choose among the below two plans:

• Visio Standard 2021 plan costs $309.99
• Visio Professional 2021 plan costs $579.99

4. Webex - Audio and Video Conference tool to communicate with customers and record conversations

Effective Communication is an essential part of effective Product Management. Webex by Cisco facilitates calling, messaging, meetings, and events in the cloud for teams of all sizes. Trusted by 95% of Fortune 500 companies, it is a flexible environment that supports a hybrid working environment and provides you a platform to communicate with your teams effectively.

Key Features

• Calling from any device with a complete cloud phone system. 
• Meetings, video conferences, and Virtual representations in HD video from anywhere with features like noise removal, gesture recognition, and automatic transcription and custom layouts.
• Individual and team messaging with file sharing for both external and internal teams.
• Polling and Q&A to make your meetings more interactive and engage everyone.
• Host events up to 100,000 audiences from different corners of the world.
• Enables recording of all your calls, virtual meetings, presentations, and video conferences.
• Offers integrations with 100+ industry-leading apps to enable smooth workflows.
• Advanced security features like idle time-out and forced PIN-lock to secure every recording.

Pricing

It offers multiple plans.

• Starter plan costs Rs. 1049/month
• Business plan costs Rs 2099/month
• Enterprise plan is custom plan, price varies as per business requirement.

It also offers a Free trial plan.

5. Slack - Team Messaging Tool for communication through messaging, audio, and video conferences

Slack is another messaging platform specifically designed for workplace communication for teams of any size. Developed by Slack Technologies, and now owned by Salesforce, Slack provides features to create chatrooms and channels organized by private groups, topics, and direct messaging.

Key Features

• Automate routine actions and communication with Workflow Builder. 
• Easy Search of content in previous conversations.
• Easy file sharing with individuals and groups.
• It is integratable with over 2,200 other services like Google Drive, Office 365, and more.
• It offers security and Enterprise key management facilities to control the access to your data using your own encryption keys.

Pricing

It offers multiple plans with different prices when billed yearly and monthly.

• Pro plan costs Rs 500/month when billed yearly and Rs 600/month when billed monthly.
• Business+ plan costs Rs 938/month when billed yearly and Rs 1125/month when billed monthly.
• Enterprise Grid plan is a custom plan, the price of which depends on your business requirement.

6. PowerPoint - Presentation tool

PowerPoint is a popular presentation tool that is helpful in Product Management to make presentations and slides to represent your work related to product ideas, innovation, development, modification, and anything that you want to present to your teams or colleagues. It is owned by Microsoft and you get it with Microsoft 365 subscription.

Key Features

• Designer and Ideas in PowerPoint help you create free impactful and well-designed slides.
• Insert 3D objects like 3D pictures and animations in your slides from your own files.
• With its advanced features, you can also write into slides and then convert the notes into text.
• Powered by AI, its speech feature Presenter Coach enables you to practice your speech and get suggestions related to word choice, speech pace, and more.
• Track recent changes made by others on your deck with the feature ‘While you were away’.

Pricing

You need to take a subscription to Microsoft 365 to get PowerPoint. Microsoft 365 offers multiple plans for Home and Business use. Business plans include the following:

• Microsoft 365 Business Basic plan costs Rs 125/month per user (GST extra).
• Microsoft 365 Apps for business plan costs Rs 595/month per user (GST extra).
• Microsoft 365 Standard plan costs Rs 660/month per user (GST extra).
• Microsoft 365 Business Premium plan costs Rs 1585/month per user (GST extra).

It also offers a free trial for one month.

7. Jira Software - Task Management Software

JIRA, developed by Atlassian, is a popular Product Management tool that is used by product managers for Task Management, bug tracking, and agile project management. The Task Management Software enables you to stay aligned and keep your team aligned with the task assignment, work-in-process, and completion.

Key Features

• Powerful agile boards - Scrum Boards to break large projects into smaller tasks; and Kanban Boards to visualize workflow, limit WIP and maximize team efficiency. 
• View Roadmaps to keep your teams in sync in giving full visibility of the tasks.
• Reports and dashboards in the software provide insights into the team’s performance.
• You Get Project flexibility for all workflows, you can choose between company-managed and team projects.
• Easy drag and drop automation.
• Allows customization of workflows as per your style of work.
• The tool can be integrated with 3000+ apps.

Pricing

It offers multiple plans.

• Free plan is always free for up to 10 users.
• Standard plan costs $75/month for 10 users.
• Premium plan costs $145/month for 10 users.
• Enterprise plan is billed annually and its price varies as per your requirement.

It also offers a free trial for 7 days for Standard and Premium plans.

8. Gartner - Industry Analysis Tools

One of the main objectives of Product Management is to stay in line with the competition in the ongoing market. For this, you will need to analyze the industry and do market research. Gartner is a perfect Product Management tool for this. Businesses and marketing leaders use it for purposes like industry research and benchmarking. Here are the key features and functions of this tool.

Key Features

• Get detailed insights into your competitors’ investment plans and strategies across various industries through the Annual Spend CMO Research.
• Set benchmarks against your competitors, track your performance and keep a watch on the digital impact on your industry and brand with Gartner Digital IQ Index.
• How-to guides, toolkits, frameworks, and other knowledge-sharing material to get qualitative and quantitative insights.
• Consumer and Cultural insights to better understand your customers, their demographics, and geographies for better targeting.
• Benchmarks and Diagnostics to set targets for your business and drive growth.
• Identify areas of growth and efficiency through the best Cost Optimization features.
• Hope Cycle helps to see the evolution of technologies over time and gives you an idea about the weightage of your investment options and minimizes the risk.
• Magic Quadrant is a great feature that shows the competitive position of digital technology and its service providers in the form of charts and graphs so that you can optimize your goals accordingly.

Pricing

Customized quotes as per your business requirement.

9. Google Analytics - User Analytics tool

When you are dealing in SaaS products like apps, you need to validate your product hypothesis to make product changes by analyzing user behavior through data-driven reports. Google Analytics is the perfect Product Management tool for this purpose. With the Google Analytics tool, you get a report about all active users, their demographics, interests, behavior, and the overall flow of how their usage of your app.

Key Features

• Use Google Analytics’ Audience Report to get direct, actionable insights of your users. Audience reports like Interests help you discover what products your users are more likely to be interested in and target your users accordingly.
• Use Flow Visualization Graphics like Behavioural Flow report to know the flow of traffic on your website and SaaS products, which helps you focus on the right channels.
• It allows you to do Custom Reporting to make your own reports as per your business goals. 
• Use your insights to deliver results as Google Analytics also works with Google advertising and publisher products.

Pricing

It offers two plans. 

• It offers a Free plan.
• 360 plan, the cost of which starts from $12500 per month and  $150.000/year.

It does not offer a free trial.

10. Apptimize - a Feature flagging software

Feature Flagging is a technique through which product managers can use to turn certain functionalities on and off, without needing to deploy a new code. If you want to manage your products’ functionality, a feature flagging tool like Apptimize is the best option.

• The product management tool is mobile-friendly and delivers the best mobile experimentation and optimization experience.
• You get adequate support from the customer success teams at all digital touchpoints.
• You get easy-to-deploy SDKs, a centralized dashboard, and an intuitive web app.
• The app offers powerful integrations. It integrates with your data, analytics, and CRM automatically.
• With easy A/B testing and refined processes, you can track each customer’s journey and the impact of any feature update through all channels.
• You get full control of product and feature releases to lessen the risk.
• You can launch new updates in your apps instantly without needing to launch a different version of your product.
• Its Robust WYSIWYG Visual Editor enables even non-technical users to launch experiments related to copying CTAs, images, navigation items, and more in a few minutes.

Pricing

It offers three plans

• Free plan with Standard Feature flags
• Custom plan with Advanced Feature flags
• Customer plan with Enterprise A/B experiment+Featue flags

Price is not disclosed. It also offers a free trial for 30-days of all the features.

11. Inspectlet - Session Reply and Heatmap tool

It will be useful for a product manager to know how your customers are using your product and what experience they are getting, whereas heatmaps are helpful to understand the user behavior. Inspectlet is the right Product Management tool that can help you serve both these purposes.

Key Features

• You can record videos of the users using your product.
• You can clearly track every mouse movement of your users including a scroll, click, and keypress.
• You can also understand the user mindset by having a view of what they were looking for, where they get confused, and what makes them signup for your product.
• You can also get videos of new visits and track cart abandonment with this tool to know the reasons for it and work to improve your conversion.
• You get eye-tracking heatmaps to understand which part of your website/app grabbed more attention of the users as eye movements and mouse movements are correlated.
• Track which buttons are working for you and help you get more conversions, and use the data to increase sales.
• You get scroll heatmaps to know which part of your website or app was uninteresting for the user and which part grabbed attention.

Pricing

It offers multiple plans:

• Micro plan costs $39/month
• Startup plan costs $79/month
• Growth plan costs $149/month
• Accelerate plan costs $299/month
• Enterprise plan costs $499/month

12. Google Drive - Collaboration tool

Product Management requires you to store your data with security and collaborate with your teams to edit and manage your data. Google Drive is the most popular Product Management tool for this purpose. It helps you with collaboration tools like Docs, Sheets, and Slides.

Key Features

• You can upload files of different types and formats on Google Drive, and save them for future use.
• You can create Shared drives for your teams to share your data that is to be used by multiple persons.
• You can collaborate with your team members in real-time, you get the options to add comments and tag members in them.
• Google Drive supports 100+ file types, you can sync with files like Microsoft Office files and collaborate with your teams on those files without having to convert formats.
• You can access the version history of your files to avoid any version conflicts. You can clearly track when and which team member made which changes in the files.

Pricing

It offers two plans:

• Personal plan is free of cost and gives you 15 GB of storage per user.
• Business Standard plan costs $12/month per user giving you 2 TB of storage per user.

Conclusion

Product Development involves various stages, functions, and responsibilities for the product managers. When you use the right tools to carry on these tasks, much of your burden is reduced, and you get a good insight into what your customers expect from you. In this way, you can deliver the best products to your customers and achieve high success.