Tools are one of the many qualities that differentiate us from animals—using them, devising them, and improving them. They make our lives easier, fix broken items, and even make better products. But as Wallace D. Wattles, American New Thought writer and author of The Science of Success, puts it, "It is essential to have good tools, but it is also essential that the tools should be used in the right way."
Whether you're a startup or an established product developer, we, too, think you should have good tools and use them in the right way. That's why we put together this list of the 14 best product management tools for your product management toolkit.
Without further ado, here are the 14 product management tools of 2022 best suited for your needs, from end-to-end, comprehensive solutions to solutions focused on one piece of the product management system:
Comprehensive, end-to-end product management tools
Comprehensive product management tools give product owners the ability to keep all of their work on one platform. This convenience speeds up the development process by reducing the need for synchronization and maintaining multiple tools. If fewer but more capable platforms are what you're looking for, then these are the tools you need.
Productboard
Purpose: Productboard is a customer-centric product management platform that helps product managers understand customers' needs, prioritize following builds and fixes, and organize the product team around the roadmap.
Key features:
Shareable, agile, and customizable product roadmaps, which are grounded in customer feedback and tailored to each stakeholder's unique needs.
Product and feature prioritization around a clear strategy informed by user insights.
Centralized feedback to capture every product idea, request, and advice from colleagues and customers.
User engagement tool to validate feature ideas and source new ones.
Integrations: Connects to 100s of systems, such as JIRA, Salesforce, Microsoft, Slack, and open APIs.
Best for: Product developers who tend to emphasize customer research, prioritization, and product road mapping work.
ProdPad
Purpose: ProdPad product management software combines the power of objective-based lean roadmapping with comprehensive management of ideas, experimentation, and user feedback.
Key features:
"Now, Next, Later" lean product roadmaps that are fast-replacing traditional timeline roadmaps. These roadmaps support your objectives and key results (OKRs) and measure overall success.
Idea management to spot the best ideas in your product backlog, avoid time sinks by avoiding bad ideas, refine ideas, and push product specs to software development.
Feedback management to gather customer feedback from integrated sources and link it with ideas to solve the right problems for your customers.
Integrations: ProdPad integrates with 1000+ apps, including Azure DevOps, Confluence, Doorbell.io, GitHub, JIRA, Pivotal Tracker, Rally, Slack, TFS, Trello, Uservoice, and Zapier.
Best for: Product managers who lean on product lifecycle management tools, such as a backlog, roadmaps, and customer feedback.
Monday.com
Purpose: Monday.com's Work OS is a visual platform to plan, organize, and track all of your team's work in one place.
Key features:
Visual, easy, and intuitive interface to create your ideal workflow or choose from 200+ ready-made templates.
30+ customizable column types with drag and drop functionality.
Kanban, calendar, timeline, Gantt chart, map, form, workload, and main views to see your data how you want.
Tailor-made experience for any device to ensure your team members can work however they choose.
Integrations: monday.com integrates with many tools, including Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Dropbox, Slack, Zoom, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Microsoft Excel, Gmail, LinkedIn, OneDrive, Zapier, and Adobe Creative Cloud.
Best for: Product teams that want customizable workspaces, workflows, and views.
Craft.io
Purpose: Craft.io aims to connect product strategy to user-story with its end-to-end product management platform by understanding customer needs, articulating decision making, and establishing clear product processes.
Key features:
Linked strategic elements and product deliverables, from personas to OKRs, and data insights to contextualize and guide all product decisions accurately.
Best-practice prioritization frameworks, templates, and multi-dimensional capacity planning to streamline, standardize and increase output accuracy.
Live, dynamic links of roadmaps, planning, and prioritization views to connect product and development teams in a collaborative workspace. This increases alignment and accountability across the organization.
Integrations: Craft.io integrates with popular development and user feedback tools, including Azure DevOps, Google Workspace, GitLab, Active Directory, SAML, JIRA, Okta, GitHub, Dropbox, Pivotal Tracker, Intercom, and Google Drive.
Best for: Product teams that want to connect their strategies to user stories.
Product management tools focused on project management
Project management is a core tenet of product management. It keeps teams and team members on task and on time, and these tools will do precisely that.
JIRA
Purpose: JIRA, by Atlassian, is a project management tool for development teams to plan, track, and release software.
Key features:
Customizable scrum boards so agile teams can stay focused on delivering iterative and incremental value as fast as possible.
Flexible kanban boards to give your team complete visibility into what's next, delivering maximum output in minimal cycle time.
Roadmaps to sketch out the big picture, communicate plans with stakeholders, and ensure your roadmap connects to your team's work.
Out-of-the-box reports with real-time, actionable insights.
Integrations: JIRA project management software connects with more than 3000 apps, such as Tempo Timesheets, GitHub, Microsoft 365, Slack, and Google Drive.
Best for: Product developers who want to track everything, report on everything, and work in an agile fashion.
Asana
Purpose: Asana is a project management, task management, and collaboration tool to help you plan, organize, and manage your team's work from start to finish.
Key features:
Timeline to see how tasks and deadlines connect, identify problems, and fix dependency conflicts before you start, creating project plans that help you stay on schedule.
Digital Kanban boards to visualize your progress and see your team move tasks from to-do to done.
Shared team calendar to hit your projects' deadlines.
Integrations: Asana integrates with the most popular applications, like Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Google Drive, Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, Zendesk, Salesforce, Tableau, Adobe Creative Cloud, Figma, JIRA, Vimeo, Zapier, and Dropbox.
Best for: Product managers who want to track, manage, and automate tasks while maximizing collaboration.
Wrike
Purpose: Wrike's is a customizable work management platform designed to increase your team's productivity and efficiency at every level for every task and project.
Key features:
Customizable dashboards, workflows, request forms, and more.
360° visibility across departments to eliminate silos, find information quickly, and make decisions in real-time.
Better collaboration through file, task, and report sharing, plus visual proofing and automated approval systems to shorten the feedback process.
Integrations: Wrike integrates with 400+ cloud and on-premises apps, including Salesforce, Tableau, Microsoft Teams, MediaValet, Adobe Creative Cloud, Google Drive, Microsoft Sharepoint, Microsoft One-Drive, Gmail, Tenovos, GitHub, JIRA, SAML, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Project, Microsoft Excel, Slack, Dropbox, Okta, Box, OneLogin, PingFederate, Shibboleth, Marker.io, and TestLodge.
Best for: Product teams who want a custom work management platform, including custom dashboards and workflows.
Product management tools best for roadmapping
Product roadmapping is an essential product manager responsibility because it plots a product's evolutional path from its current state to the desired state. Therefore, an essential task requires an essential tool. Here's what we recommend.
Aha!
Purpose: Aha! is a product roadmapping tool that helps you set a strategy, capture ideas, and prioritize work.
Key features:
Planning board to manage your backlog and prioritize features.
Epics to provide a way to group work items that span across many releases.
Detail capture capabilities with rich formatting options—tables, checklists, highlighted text, and other records references—to clarify what is needed.
Kanban boards to monitor the team's work progression.
User story maps to create accurate product data, making it easy to build out your plans.
Customizable workflows, statuses, fields, and layouts to match the way your team works.
Integrations: Aha! integrates with more than 30 popular applications, including JIRA, Slack, Azure DevOps, Salesforce, Google Analytics, and Zendesk.
ProductPlan
Purpose: ProductPlan is a roadmap platform that helps you create and share custom, live roadmaps to collaborate with and keep a team in sync.
Key features:
Unlimited roadmaps to collaborate, share, and transfer between users.
SOC 2 certification and advanced security features to ensure your data is safe.
Unlimited free viewer accounts to give your stakeholders an easy way to view and provide feedback on your roadmap.
Private links to share your live roadmaps through a private URL or embedded in a Confluence or wiki page.
Custom roadmap views for different audiences, such as marketing, sales, and engineering.
Integrations: ProductPlan integrates with existing systems through API and popular applications, including Confluence, JIRA, Pivotal Tracker, Slack, Trello, Zapier, Microsoft Teams, GitHub, and Azure DevOps.
Best for: Product managers who prefer a visual drag-n-drop tool to align a team to a product’s path.
Roadmunk
Purpose: Roadmunk is an end-to-end roadmapping tool that captures customer feedback, prioritizes what to build next, and uses boardroom-ready roadmaps to communicate your strategy.
Key features:
Timeline to visualize your strategy and create alignment around initiatives, objectives, and milestones.
Swimlane to keep agile teams on track for flexible timelines.
Different views to tailor your roadmap to specific audiences.
Dependency visualization to identify relationships between initiatives, even if it exists on someone else's roadmap.
Integrations: Roadmunk integrates with existing systems via API and integrates with JIRA and Azure DevOps.
Best for: Product teams who want to build customer-driven product roadmaps to prioritize what to build next.
Product management tools best for designing and prototyping
Designing and prototyping take product ideas from concept to near functionality, so the team can understand if and how they will solve a customer's problem. But it's not easy, and time is of the essence. That's why you need these tools to get you there.
Figma
Purpose: Figma is a collaborative design tool that combines web accessibility with native-app functionality.
Key features:
Design features: a modern pen tool, instant arc designs, OpenType, Auto Layout, plugin automation and augmentation, and enhanced developer handoff.
Prototyping features: intuitive UI building with subtle interactions and mobile viewing, advanced transitions with Smart Animate, dynamic overlays, and animated GIFs.
Design systems features: searchable assets, shareable styles, and libraries.
Integrations: Figma features integrations with Maze, Zeplin, Confluence, ProtoPie, Flinto, Principle, Framer Web, Maker, Pendo, Bubble, Axure, Zero Height, Avocode, Storybook, GitLab, Slack, Notion, Asana, P2, Dropbox, Trello, Coda, JIRA, Dribbble, StoriesOnBoard, and Qatalog.
Best for: Collaborative design teams who want to prototype fast from an established design system.
InVision
Purpose: InVision is an online digital whiteboard that helps teams go from ideas to execution.
Key features:
Freehand: for teams to plan, brainstorm, and draw together on a shared online whiteboard.
Cloud: Prototype to create experiences that feel real, without any code; Craft, a plugin for Sketch and Photoshop that revolutionizes your design process; Specs for smoother, teamwide handoffs.
Studio: Design, prototype, and animate all in one place.
DSM: The design system platform that connects design and code teams for smarter, faster, and in-sync work.
Integrations: InVision integrates with Photoshop, Asana, Confluence, JIRA, Trello, Google Docs, Figma, Microsoft Teams, Sketch, and Slack.
Best for: Product teams who want to “whiteboard” and share their ideas online for faster product development.
Product management tools best for customer feedback
Who better tell you what they want in and from a product than your customer. That's why these tools will help you get their feedback to help you make a better product.
SurveyMonkey
Purpose: SurveyMonkey is online survey software that helps you gather customer feedback, conduct market research, and deliver a seamless customer experience.
Key features:
Customer satisfaction surveys to find out what your customers want, need, and expect.
Market research surveys to get opinions from potential and existing customers, test concepts, measure brand awareness, etc.
Employee surveys to measure employee satisfaction, conduct 360 reviews, or send out compliance quizzes.
Integrations: SurveyMonkey integrates with many apps, including Google Drive, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft OneDrive, Zapier, Freshdesk, Zendesk, and monday.com.
Best for: Product teams who want a simple, easy to use, and world’s leading online survey software to reach their customers.
Typeform
Purpose: Typeform offers a free online survey maker with customizable templates to gather customer feedback and conduct market research.
Key features:
800+ survey templates for market research, customer feedback, new product feedback, and more.
20+ question types to make survey questions more inviting.
Tips to help you get the most out of your survey questions.
Integrations: Typeform surveys integrate with many apps, including Google Forms, Notion, Canva, Slack, Asana, Microsoft Excel Online, Intercom, monday.com, Google Analytics, and Microsoft Teams.
Best for: Product teams that need a hand developing better questions and getting better insights from their questions with ready-to-go templates and tool guidance from Typform.
DevSquad, the ultimate product management tool (team)
Whether you need product management tool guidance or a team to hire, DevSquad is here for you. Our experts specialize in:
MVP development
API development
Prototyping development
Web application development
Mobile application development
And have technical skills in:
Laravel
VueJs
Node.js
React
Angular
Electron
Ready to develop and launch a new product or add a new product feature? Let's talk.
