Best Product Management Software

Role of Product Managers

A product manager is responsible for formulating strategies, creating a product roadmap, and creating feature definitions of the product. He is also responsible for developing products for an organization and mobilizing various activities associated with the delivery of the product. A product manager understands and defines the needs of consumers.

He even comprehends the objectives of the business and translates them into innovative products. Every firm needs a product manager to leverage his product expertise and make strategic product decisions that aim to create successful products. The role combines innovation and creativity to develop a concept into a product.

What is Product Management Tools?

The ability to manage the products effectively is the most important task within any organization. There are so many tedious and time-consuming tasks, from developing to selling of the products in the cycle of product development, which is to be completed on a daily basis in the firm. Product management software comes as a boon in handling these tasks. It is a robust tool that helps simplify all these tasks by automating most tasks and reducing the hassles.

It allows product managers to focus on other vital aspects of product development. Earlier, product managers had limited tools to help them complete their tasks. With product management tools, managers can eliminate other time-consuming tools and elevate their productivity. 

Features of Product Management Tools 

Product management is a process that includes business, technology, and user experience. Best product management software should have all the features that cover all the aspects of product development, making them seamless and less time-consuming. These features include:

1. Facilitating in creation of a high-level product roadmap

A product roadmap is a visual summary mapping the vision & direction of your product and the steps that you’d take to create the final product. A product map basically communicates why you are building a certain product and what exactly the product is. It provides a guiding document for implementing the strategy that is opted.

2. Idea Management

With tons of ideas around you, the system should help you to find the best ideas that are most suitable for your business. It should allow your team members to submit their ideas in the software, and you can review them and put them on the workflow. You can translate these ideas into functional specs, user stories, and personas.  It’s very useful as it stores everything for you while you develop your ideas into a product, from customer feedback to users sharing their experiences. 

3. Customer feedbacks

Customer feedback is the most important aspect to consider when making product decisions. While building your product idea, you should use the customer feedback you’ve been collecting across your business. The system should help you link the feedback to an idea, making it easy for you and your team leader to refer back to customer comments while you develop the idea further.

4. Product portfolio

Picking the right idea and then implementing it in the right way, along with the right resources and at the right time, should be a very beneficial feature of a product management system. A product portfolio is the collection of all the products and services offered by a company. With the product portfolio, you can have a look at all your products or study a single product roadmap closely.

5. Task management

Better planning of tasks leads to a more productive product. Task management enables you to create a list of all the things you need to do so that you can easily delegate those tasks to suitable team members and easily track the status of these tasks. In order to ensure everything is carried out according to your plan, you can even set deadlines and other particulars.

6. Collaboration

It is the most important feature of product management tools. In order to make a product better, it is very necessary to collaborate with the team in order to come up with a well-designed plan. An effective product management software should be able to support users to upload documents, and images, comment on tasks, share calendars and chat in groups. This eliminates the troubles of any mix-ups, saves time, and helps to keep everything on track.

Product Management Software Vs. Project Management Software

In many organizations, the concept of product management is often confused with project management. However, clearly defining the roles of a product manager and a project manager and understanding their responsibilities results in a high-performance organization. It also facilitates in setting appropriate expectations of goals and results.

The functions of project management and product management often overlap, which causes misconceptions about the results, values, and benefits that these functions bring.

In general, project and product management are two different aspects of a business. A product satisfies the needs of a consumer, while the project is a one-time endeavor aiming towards creating a product or service right from its planning to its completion. 

A product manager sets the product direction, understands the users' needs, and then builds a product that meets those needs. The person needs to have a product sense- when to release a product when to remove a product or a part of it due to any reason. He is also responsible for the profit and loss of a product. Hence, he collaborates with sales, marketing, and customer experience departments to achieve business goals. 

Product management ensures whether a product or a service meets the customers' needs. It includes monitoring and modifying the product and its features, marketing mix elements, distribution channels, communication strategies, and budget.

The project, on the other hand, is a plan with a series of activities with a defined outcome and a starting and ending date. On the accomplishment of the outcome, the project is completed. Project management includes organizing all the activities related to a project and its components. The main aim of project management is to ensure that all the project objectives are achieved. A project manager executes the strategies and works with a team with diverse skills. He ensures timely project completion while keeping in mind the intended budget.

Both project and product managers have to work with the customers to define the scope. However, they focus on different aspects of the scope. The main focus of project manager lies on “how” work is oriented, while the main focus of a product manager lies on “what” are the functional requirements. A product manager tries to add features whereas the project manager focuses on delivering the project on time and wants to keep the scope as small as possible. Then, both try to balance these two components and that’s how they work together. 

It’s true that both project and product management have some common responsibilities, but both of them perform unique functions. When they collaborate together, they ensure higher productivity of the organization.

Product Road Map: The Real And The Ideal

A product roadmap is a tool that outlines how the product will be made to cater to stakeholders’ needs, how it will grow across different releases, and how the capital to support the product will be acquired. The product roadmap needs to be tailored according to the needs of every organization. In most of cases, the product manager struggles to balance the ideal and the real product map. 

At the most ideal level, your product roadmap shows a map of the entire territory that your product is covering. It contains a picture of what your product will consist of if the resources were unlimited.

However, while creating a product roadmap, you need to understand that the product roadmap should be relevant and achievable. Everything your product does today is the inner line, and what you aim for your product is the outer one. A product manager's task is to ensure that both the inner line and the outer line co-inside. The things that really differentiate between the two are the capabilities like internal development, partnerships or acquisitions added in your product. 

Understanding the ideal and real roadmap helps you bridge the gap between real and ideal. It clearly explains where you are and where you want to go and helps you identify the capabilities or steps you need to take to reach the perfect picture of your product.

Benefits of Product Management Tools

In this era of rapidly changing technology, innovative and robust products are launched in the market every now and then. Product managers also seek the best product management tools to help them carry out their mundane tasks seamlessly and effectively.

Some of the advantages of the product management system are listed below:

• The Product Management System facilitates easy collaboration between the team members and the managers, as they can post their ideas on the system and even connect via group chats.
• The product roadmap tool ensures better delivery of product meetings. Using tools to build your roadmap gives you more flexibility, so you can easily decide which ideas you’d like to keep or drop in a particular meeting. The details that you drop would still be there in the system. They’d be hidden from your view menu so that the executives can focus only on those details/ideas that you want them to see. You can also drop all the details or data on your roadmap and keep them hidden as long as needed. Hence, you can present a systematic and uncluttered view of the roadmap and very easily use all your data. 
• Project Management System aims towards efficient sharing. You can avoid all the trouble that comes with multiple documents around your organization. You can store your product data in a central location and give access to view it only to the members you trust. You can also keep track of who is viewing the roadmap.
• Product management tools help you in pulling data from various platforms and storing everything from customer feedbacks to user stories in order to translate them into stellar product ideas. It also encourages internal discussions, letting your team help you come up with ideas in your product backlog. 
• The product roadmap tool makes it easier to create a new roadmap which initially seems overwhelming if wrong tools are used. However, with a dedicated product roadmap software, you can create a new roadmap. You can update it anywhere and anytime without manual reformatting or other tiring and time-consuming design work. 
• In order to be successful, considering customer feedback is very necessary because, ultimately, they will use your product. Product management software makes it easier for you to create a list of customers whose requests were fulfilled or a feature they wanted was launched. You can then connect with such customers. The system helps you to extract feedback of such customers from various service platforms. 
• Product management tools help you in coordinating strategic efforts across products. You can use your product portfolio in defining your goals, scope and success criteria for each product. 

Latest Market Trends in Product Management Tools

• In their quest of exploring innovative ways to make the experience of existing users better, the companies are emphasizing on making project manager software tool modular. They are finding creative and innovative ways to make portions of their product available to the subsets of existing users.
• More and more companies are using APIs with the best product management software. It helps the customers to integrate the company’s products into other commercial applications thereby making the software more useful in their actual workplace.
• The companies are adding customer value by automating most of their tasks. It empowers the companies to solve the problems of their customers by scaling up their marketing efforts, saving their time and ensuring that they don’t miss opportunities just because they didn’t perform an action manually.
• The companies are integrating business intelligence tools and cutting-edge technologies to manage large chunks of data that they’re compiling. This valuable data and information are related to the customers, product performance, and the company’s market in general. These tools also help in finding new ways to turn old data into valuable insights.

Related Research Articles:

• A 10-Minute Introduction to Product Management