Product management software is not a new tool on the block, but its importance increased significantly as product management and project management roles became critically important and more and more in demand.
Projects that we are creating became more complex, requiring various teams and individuals to collaborate with each other. At the same time, those projects need to reflect on ideas from internal clients while at the same time implementing customer feedback.
There are so many data, ideas, features, teams, and user feedback to manage, that it is impossible to keep track of that all with an excel sheet or a notepad.
To have a clear roadmap of your project and to ensure an agile collaboration between teams – you need product management software.
So without further ado, let’s get into it!
What is the best product management software?
In this section, I will go over some of the best tools that you can use to improve your product management and project development.
ProductPlan
If you’re looking for product management software that has a great user interface, it doesn’t get much better than ProductPlan. But, there is much more to this tool than simple visuals. It is specifically made for agile teams that need to communicate quickly and execute strategies in a short amount of time.
This is one of the best product management software if you wish to create a roadmap from the start to finish. ProductPlan utilizes Gantt charts and combines great visuals and colors. It provides a great user experience for all users from managers to low-tier employees.
The product management tool is utilized by some of the world’s largest companies including Coca-Cola and HubSpot. You can utilize one of its 25+ templates when creating product roadmaps.
Perhaps the biggest issue with the product management platform is that it doesn’t provide a solution for requirement management. Luckily, most users will neglect this problem as they’re able to handle each requirement separately.
The platform allows numerous integrations and tracking. You can combine it with Azure DevOps, Trello, Slack, Jira, GitHub, and other management solutions.
ProductPlan pricing
The software has 3 pricing plans: Business ($39 per month), Enterprise (contact for a quote), and Enterprise (contact for a quote).
ProdPad
ProdPad represents one of the best product collaboration tools due to its numerous lifecycle management features. You can use it for creating roadmaps, product backlog, getting customer feedback, and numerous other things.
With this project management software, you can rest assured that everyone on your team is working in cohesion. The tool is completely web-based allowing for real-time updates and tracking. Your team members will be aware of any change as soon as it happens.
Product managers praise this tool for its numerous, flexible features such as annotated designs, product spec templates, as well as real user personas.
Although one of the best product management tools on the market, ProdPad has a few visible flaws. For example, users often think that its search feature is subpar compared to other product management tools. Because of that, it is sometimes hard to streamline processes.
Product managers are able to integrate this platform with Slack, Rally, Trello, Confluence, GitHub, Google Apps, Dropbox, and so on. ProdPad is great for planning products and roadmapping solutions. You can also use it to capture ideas and share them with your team.
ProdPad pricing
The product strategy platform offers 3 plans to its users: Essential ($149 per month), Advanced ($449 per month), and Performance ($1299 per month).
Productboard
Cloud-based software can provide great assistance during the project management process. A company can use it to prioritize tasks, create a product roadmap, and perform customer research.
With this product management system, you are able to create task deadlines. Processes are categorized based on their priority and arranged within boards. The task management solution helps teams all over the world including giants such as Zendesk and Microsoft.
The biggest issue with Productboard is its lack of integration. Although the tool works with Jura, GitHub, Slack, Zendesk, and numerous other platforms, it doesn’t have as many integrations as some other product management software on the list.
Productboard is renowned for its ability to aggregate product insights. You can also use the platform to categorize customer requirements in multiple inboxes. For example, you can share this data within Slacks or some other third-party tools. This makes it a perfect project management tool when there is a lot of back and forth with a client.
Productboard pricing
Productboard offers 4 different price plans to its customers: Essentials ($20 per maker per month), Pro ($50 per maker per month), Scale ($100 per maker per month), and Enterprise (contact for pricing). There is also a 15-day free trial.
Roadmunk
This product management system relies on its colorful, intuitive interface for creating a product roadmap. By using Roadmunk, teams can easily manage their product creation and, in particular, software development. You can use it to set up timelines and milestones that will help your team throughout the process.
This is a customer-driven solution that can be used from start to finish. It is popular among product managers as it allows them to prioritize product development tasks, receive customer feedback, and create a wholesome project strategy.
Although its interface is its biggest advantage, it sometimes works to its detriment. When you use too many colors and formats, the reports become convoluted and overwhelming. So, if you wish to present your progress in front of numerous stakeholders, you would need to modify this data beforehand and convert it into a file that is more suitable.
Roadmunk can be natively integrated with Jira. There are numerous other integration options that would allow you to combine this product management software with various other tools.
Roadmunk pricing
Roadmunk has a 14-day free trial that would allow companies to check its features. The product management platform offers 4 pricing options to its users: Starter ($19 per month), Business ($49 per month), Professional ($99 per month), and Enterprise (contact for a quote).
Airfocus
This is one of the best product management software for highly customizable product roadmapping. Given that it’s a web-based platform, you will be notified about product development progress in real-time.
Managers can use it to create product roadmaps with clear prioritization. There is also a scoring board that helps teams determine what is the most urgent task. You can use Airfocus to focus on specific opportunities based on cost criteria and a set of values.
Some of the users have experienced issues when integrating this product management tool with other apps. In certain cases, you might be forced to manually enter values instead of them being transferred automatically. You can combine the platform with Trello, Asana, Basecamp, BitLab, Jira, and so on. If you integrate it with Zapier, the number of potential integration will increase exponentially.
Airfocus is one of the best product management tools if you want to rank every aspect of product development. There are clear scoring criteria making it impossible to make mistakes when prioritizing tasks.
Airfocus pricing
Besides having a 14-day free trial, the project management tool offers you 4 price plans: Essential ($15 per month), Advanced ($39 per month), Pro ($89 per month), and Enterprise (contact the company for a quote).
API Fuse
If you’re looking for a product management software that would help you prioritize tasks and build customer-facing integrations, it doesn’t get much better than API Fuse. As its name implies, this software is especially great for fusing several tools in one major platform.
With it, product managers can focus on the specific integration they wish to build first. What’s even better is that you can do all of this without having to add to the development backlog.
Due to this feature, the product management tool is especially good for SaaS companies. A product manager can utilize it to showcase integrations that are popular among customers and get their feedback. One of its main features will allow the connection of disparate apps within their SaaS platform.
Keep in mind that this is one of the youngest project management tools on the market. So, the number of potential integrations is a bit limited compared to its peers. Nevertheless, you can still combine API Fuse with some of the most popular tools on the market.
API Fuse pricing
The product solution has 4 price plans: Basic (free), Growth ($750 per month), Platform ($1,500 per month), and White Glove (contact the company for a quote).
Harvestr
This real-time software is great for roadmapping product development, but it also provides various collaboration options for the users. Its interface is rather simplistic, and the tool can be used by all the team members regardless of their experience with product management tools.
Among its best features, I need to mention customer feedback management, product roadmap, prioritization of tasks, as well as release notifications. Harvestr is great for agile idea management as it allows a product manager to quickly share thoughts and data about a particular project.
It is a customer-driven product management tool that helps software development according to ideal clients’ feedback. The tool is very versatile and you can integrate it with various other cloud-based software such as Salesforce, Slack, Zendesk, and so on.
This release management tool also excels in terms of its customer support. Clients have access to the knowledge base, chat, phone support, email support, and forum.
Harvestr pricing
On top of its free trial, a product manager can choose between 3 plans: Rise ($39 per month), Scale ($79 per month), and Elite (contact the company for a quote).
Pendo
According to reviews, there are numerous reasons why you should utilize this product management tool. Besides helping you with the managerial tasks, the solution can be utilized to improve your sales and marketing figures. The tool is also famous for its ability to provide a top-notch customer experience.
Pendo was created by some of the biggest minds in the industry. This product management software is a joint project of Google, Cisco, Rally, and Red Hat employees. The tool relies on its great analytic suite, contextual guide, as well as user feedback within the app, as ways of assisting companies when measuring customer satisfaction.
It is one of the better product management tools in terms of its features. You can use it to perform behavioral analytics, audience targeting, communication management, customer segmentation, conversion tracking, and many other actions. The tool allows you to set goals, and save time during roadmapping.
If product teams encounter issues along the way, the company can help them out with chat support, email, phone, and knowledge base assistance.
Pendo pricing
There are several pricing tiers you can choose from: Free, Team, Pro, and Enterprise. Except for the Free plan, which is obviously free, you will have to contact the company to get a quote for all other versions of the product.
Nifty
Nifty can be used by all companies regardless of their size. The tool is utilized for project release management as well as improving the productivity of a team during product development. It combines numerous nifty features from other software and places them into one comprehensive app.
You can utilize it to set up milestones and manage the progress of your team. Furthermore, it is great for sharing ideas between team members. So, not only is it good for user feedback, but it will help with the project deadlines as well.
The product management software works through a c list or Kanban view, and it has an integrated calendar that helps with planning and tracking. Naturally, product managers can extract all this data to their personal computers or share it in other apps.
Among its main features, it is worth mentioning activity feed and other notifications, business process control, business process automation, brainstorming, content and contact management, cost-to-completion tracking, document management, and so on.
Nifty pricing
There are 4 plans to choose from: Starter ($49 per month), Pro ($99 per month), Business ($149 per month), and Enterprise ($499 per month).
TeamGantt
If you like to work in Gantt, this will be the best product management tools for you. You can use the product management tool to track several processes at once and see how far they’ve gone. It is especially great for complex product development where you have to monitor several intricate processes at once.
Users praise TeamGantt for its simplistic interface. The tool is easy to use even for newbies. Its Gantt charts are intuitive and interactive, and you get lots of data from one dashboard. If you encounter an issue, there is a great tutorial that will help you out. Lastly, it is worth mentioning the tool’s automatic dependencies correction feature.
Of course, the platform has a few flaws as well. It doesn’t have any feature that would help you with budget or invoicing. The reports are rather average looking, and it lacks notifications, and discussion, which are otherwise common for this kind of tools.
TeamGantt pricing
You can choose from 3 plans: Free plan, Standard plan ($24 per month), Advanced plan ($29 per month).
Why Use a Product Management Software?
In today’s day and age is hard to imagine project management or product management without the use of product management softwares.
Product management is a team job that requires an agile approach, and these tools allow you to create a clear strategy and roadmaps that will make the collaboration of the product teams much more efficient.
Below are some of the main reasons:
Idea Management
When you are developing a product or just working on a project, there will be many ideas coming to you from various teams and feedback that you will get from reviews and users.
If you do not save and manage these ideas properly, they will quickly be forgotten and you will never know if that particular idea might be that tipping point for your potential customers.
The tools in this review will make sure to capture and manage all those ideas, making sure the ones that are relevant will become part of the roadmap.
Task Management
Roadmapping, tasks, and deadlines are critically important for a product manager. In order to have them all properly tracked, you need a tool to help you. Task management tools will ensure that everything is monitored with details and deadlines.
Project Management
To keep your project moving forward you not only need to track everything but also have tools in place that will track the deadlines and keep the responsibilities strictly divided. This will ensure proper management of your projects and will keep them running smoothly as everybody will know what their deliverables are and to deliver them.
Roadmapping
Having a roadmap in place is important as you must know where you going, to ensure a good collaboration with other product team members. These features will lay out the whole plan, even with some cool visualizations if needed. This might come in very handy to product managers as they constantly need to present the development plan to management and internal teams.
Collaboration
Collaboration without product management tools is extremely difficult. Constantly resending files, discovering that one of the teams was working with the old version. Agile collaboration is impossible to imagine without tools that would help everybody to communicate and be on the same page concerning the state of the product’s progress.
Main Features Of Product Management Tools
The final pick will depend on your and your team preferences, but here are some areas to consider when choosing:
Dashboard
I like a clean and coherent dashboard. Right after I log in, I want to immediately see the newest updates and be able to get a snapshot of the state of my project. While not critical, it can save a lot of time and prevent any unnecessary clicking around.
Reporting
If you need a more detailed analysis of the work that was done on the product, good reporting is a must. You may need to generate reports for your management or just analyze the development bottlenecks – good reporting will make sure that these tasks are easy.
Visualizations
Somebody likes a classical calendar, another one may prefer Gantt graphs or look at a Kanban board. While it may seem like a minor issue, we all have special quirks that make us work more efficiently. So why not make sure that they are satisfied and each product team member has their preferred view.
Integration
It is always good to make sure that the product platform will integrate well with the tools that you are already using. Sure, you can do a lot of things that can be done through 3rd party tools like Zapier, but it is easier to have a direct integration.
Feedback
Reviews, teams data, feedback from customers, user comments – there is so much information that you will be receiving that a proper idea management feature would be a great help. The vast majority of project management tools in this list will have a special feature for that or will allow you to make an in-app solution that will be enough
What is product management process?
The product management process creates new products that are brought to the market. At the beginning of every product or feature that you like, there is an idea that goes through a strategy capture and is developed into a final product.
But of course, it is a bit more complicated than that. Product managers have to take many things into consideration, internal and external factors, customer feedback, KPIs, and much more. The product management process ensures that teams and tasks are all in sync to create the best product for customers.
What do software product managers do?
If you would need to create a small web app, a single programmer could probably do it. But now imagine that you are launching a new product on Amazon on Netflix! Customer experience, backend, frontend, financial department – these are just a few of the teams that need to be in sync to create a good final product.
In addition to that, you will have several existing software products that your new product will have to interact with.
Software product managers have to understand internal company processes, programming, finance, user experience, user interface, and other things. Ultimately, they are responsible for the final delivery of the product and must align all the engaged teams so they collaborate towards the end goal.
What is product roadmapping?
Product roadmapping is an agile process that outlines the whole progress of the product creation with all the ideas and deadlines. When you are creating a product, you need to move from point A (not product) to point B (finished product) the line between those two points is a road and the map parts stand for including all the tools, teams, features, and ideas that will have to be included.
When this all is laid out and written down with a clear timeline – it is referred to as a product roadmap.
FAQ
What is the purpose of product management?
To take a product from the stage of idea to a final version that can be used by customers.
What is product development software?
Tool that helps you to monitor ideas, tasks, teams, feedback and everything else to ensure the smooth development of the software product up until the very end.
