14 Best Product Management Tools (Plus Tips from Senior PMs)

Learn about the different product management tools to consider adding to your stack, with 14 options that stand out in reviews.

Best Practices
July 29, 2022
Image of Mallory Busch
Mallory Busch
Product Marketer, dbt Labs
Best Product Management Tools

Product management tools include the platforms, websites, and software that help make your job as a product manager (PM) easier. As a product manager, you deal with all the facets of product development—from ideation to launch. You’re responsible for juggling stakeholder expectations, managing team workflows, aligning your product with market demands, and more.

To add to the complexity, most product managers also navigate a myriad of challenges, including information silos, ineffective communication, and lack of organization.

The good news is that your stack of product management tools can help. A robust tool suite helps you track product development from start to finish. With the right tools, you can easily share updates, organize work, and understand what your customers want. This way, you and your team can work better together and focus on making products that fit your market.

Key takeaways
  • Product managers need a diverse product stack with various tools for different aspects of the role.
  • Platforms like Aha!, Jira, monday.com, and Productboard are useful for issue tracking, road mapping, and overall project management.
  • Amplitude, Tableau, and other analytics tools help gather customer insights, with some platforms being more robust than others.
  • Other tools like online whiteboards and video conferencing help with collaboration and communication.

14 top product management tools for product managers

These 14 tools assist with different aspects of the PM role, such as insight generation, communication, project management, and issue tracking. Here, you’ll find information about each tool to help you understand how it can improve your work. Read on for a more in-depth look at each tool’s purpose and value.

Project management

Aha!

Aha! is a comprehensive product development platform with robust customization options and integrations. It helps product managers take a product from idea to implementation.

Atlassian Jira and Confluence

Jira enables bug and issue tracking and agile product management and Confluence helps teams collaborate and share information.

monday.com

monday.com is a workflow management tool that helps you to manage day-to-day activities and projects. 

Miro

Miro is a visual collaboration tool where product teams can design products, brainstorm new ideas, and manage projects.

Notion

Notion is a versatile tool for note-taking and project management. The platform has many organizational features like to-do lists, project tracking, etc. 

Productboard

Productboard enables product managers to prioritize features, understand feedback, and create successful roadmaps.

Product analytics and insights

Amplitude

Amplitude is a self-serve digital analytics platform designed to empower your teams to understand your customer journey. It helps you uncover what your customers love, where they run into issues, and what keeps them returning.

Gong

Gong records and transcribes your customer calls and derives insights from those interactions so you can identify and understand what drives performance.

SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is a customer feedback tool that provides data-driven insights about what customers want from you and how they perceive your product.  

Tableau

Tableau is used for business intelligence and data visualization, enabling product managers to see and understand data quickly and conveniently to make data-driven business decisions. 

Collaboration 

Loom

Loom is a video recording and sharing tool that makes it easy for product managers to record and send demos, explain complex topics, and share information with team members. 

Slack

Slack enables teams to message and collaborate efficiently and in real-time. Product managers can use Slack to message team members, make video calls, share files, and more. 

Product design

 

Figma 

Figma, a designing and prototyping platform, enables you to develop prototypes that closely resemble the final product.

Market intelligence

 

Gartner

Gartner is a leading industry research platform that product managers use to understand their market and industry and differentiate their products. 

 

Project management tools

1. Aha!: Product development platform

Aha! is a versatile product development platform widely used by PMs for strategizing, product planning, issue tracking, and road mapping. This powerful suite of tools has an intuitive interface, making it easy to communicate features and priorities across departments.

While the functionality is extensive, there’s often a learning curve as teams learn how to customize the tool to suit their team’s needs. Once you’re up and running, it’s easy to see why this is a popular choice for product managers across various industries.

“The most complete and intuitive tool for managing the full product management lifecycle. Aha! has been our top product management tool because it allows us to easily gather customer/user feedback, manage and build our digital products through their full lifecycle, and integrate with our downstream developer tools for execution.” – Senior Director, Product Management (Gartner review)

2. Atlassian Jira and Confluence: Issue tracking and project management tools

Atlassian’s Jira is an agile, development-focused tool that’s particularly popular among software companies. It facilitates the process of planning, developing, and launching a product. Confluence is Atlassian’s collaborative documentation platform and is often used with Jira. Teams use Confluence as a single source of truth for sharing resources and knowledge.

Once you master Jira, it quickly becomes one of your most essential tools for product management work. Atlassian’s entire product suite includes some of the most robust product management tools to facilitate interdepartmental communication.

“My organization uses JIRA to organize projects and track velocity across teams. The business problem that this product addresses for my company is that we use it as a tool to communicate asynchronously across large project teams, report our tracking metrics, project-manage, and even plan and develop larger product roadmaps.” – Tanner Judge, Product Manager (TrustRadius review)

“We use Atlassian Confluence across [the] whole organization, and it’s a standard tool for project documentation storing. One of the biggest values [which] Atlassian Confluence brings to our company is that you can manage all access and edit rights to your documents from a single console or even grant customer access if needed. The other big advantage is that Atlassian Confluence [has] deep integration with another tool [s] like Jira and Miro, so you can easily share content between them.” – Oleksandr T, IT Product Manager (TrustRadius review)

3. monday.com: Work management platform

monday.com is a widely used cloud-based work management platform. It’s highly scalable and flexible, enabling teams to collaborate and automate various tasks, including project management, backlogs, roadmaps, iterations, sprints, and more. It's user-friendly, making it easy for all team members to adopt.

It’s worth noting, however, that without proper support or setup, monday.com’s robust feature set could feel overwhelming. So we recommend investing sufficient time and resources in training teams on monday.com—or any work management system you implement.

If monday.com isn’t an option for your team, other work management systems like Craft.io, Wrike, Asana, and Trello are also worth considering.

“monday.com has been an overall work hub for our company. Collaboration within my team has been seamless, and reporting was accurate and customizable. I have full visibility of all levels within the project, and all in all, it made us produce faster.” – Product Manager, IT Services (Gartner review)

4. Miro: Online whiteboard

Miro is a popular online whiteboard tool that facilitates collaboration. It has an infinite canvas and no limit on the number of boards you can create, making it a great way to visualize and plan projects of any size. Miro is a powerful resource to facilitate teamwork, whether your team works in the office, remotely, or both.

At Amplitude, Miro is one of our most popular internal tools—not just for the product org but across customer success, design, and marketing. It’s the first place anyone goes to brainstorm an idea.

“I really appreciate Miro’s intuitive interface and the ease with which it allows for real-time collaboration. The ability to simultaneously work with team members on a shared canvas, regardless of our physical locations, is incredibly valuable. Additionally, the vast array of templates saves a lot of time, especially for brainstorming and project planning sessions.” – Alon Z, Software Engineer (G2 review)

5. Notion: Note-taking and project management solution

Notion is a project management tool for note-taking and information sharing. PMs use it to coordinate projects, goals, and deadlines, helping streamline productivity and facilitate communication. It offers templates, linking, media insertion, wiki functionality, task planning, and more, all in a simple and pleasing interface.

Notion offers more features and versatility than ordinary document-sharing tools. It does have some overlapping functionality with monday.com, Asana, Confluence, and note-taking tools like Evernote. Depending on your setup, you can customize Notion to almost any business need.

“What I like best about Notion is its versatility and flexibility. Notion seamlessly combines note-taking, project management, and collaboration in a single platform. . . Overall, Notion's intuitive design and powerful features have significantly improved my organizational and productivity workflows.” – Masiha A, Junior Software Developer (G2 review)

6. Productboard: Product management platform

Productboard is a customer-centric product management platform focusing on insights and strategy. Keeping the customer in mind is a pillar of being a good product manager, so the built-in customer focus makes Productboard helpful.

Productboard can help your teams understand your customers, prioritize features based on customer requests, and easily collaborate on your roadmap. The intuitive interface and comprehensive analytics tools provide a clear overview of your product’s development cycle, from conception to launch. This visibility streamlines your workflow and empowers teams to make informed decisions quickly.

“Productboard is a valuable tool for prioritizing fe­atures. It provides [a] well-de­signed user fee­dback collection, offering valuable insights from our use­rs. The roadmap feature is straightforward and has gre­atly improved our planning and communication. It’s something we didn’t re­alize we nee­ded until we started using it.” – Varun R, Digital Product Manager (G2 review)

Product analytics and insights

7. Amplitude: Product analytics platform:

Amplitude is the #1 product analytics solution and includes sophisticated features to help generate actionable insight across your digital experiences. For example, you can use Journeys in Amplitude to gain critical insights into customer behavior—like where users drop off, the paths that result in high conversion rates, and any friction points in your customer experience.

Compared to tools like Google Analytics and Tableau, Amplitude provides web and product insights in one unified platform. Amplitude’s complete digital analytics system delivers easy-to-use marketing and product insights, enabling you to see how people interact with your company’s digital touchpoints.

“Amplitude does an excellent job of highlighting your data’s insights. You can run all the charts you want, but knowing what’s valuable is the hard part. Amplitude is the best tool for that.” – Kaiti Carpenter, Senior Product Manager, Under Armour

8. Gong: Revenue intelligence solution

Gong analyzes customer interactions over the phone, email, and web conferencing. Product managers often use it to record customer calls, gather feedback, and share key takeaways with their teams. It’s highly rated and popular among many customer-facing teams.

“Rather than listening to a Zoom recording trying to find a certain spot where something was discussed that I need to follow up on, I can very easily search the transcripts for calls in Gong to find the spot. I could read the transcript, or I could listen to the call. It is so easy to use! A big part of my job is technical sales support, and Gong enables me to save time by quickly following up with people.” – Lauren P, Product Specialist (G2 review)

9. SurveyMonkey: Customer feedback tool

SurveyMonkey is one of the top survey tools for gathering customer feedback. Alternatives include TypeForm and SurveySparrow, which offer different functionality.

When choosing a survey tool, evaluate the types of questions, data, and analytics the platform supports. SurveyMonkey offers many question types—from simple multiple-choice queries to more complex matrix questions—enabling teams to collect more nuanced data.

The platform can also integrate survey data with other tools and platforms, ensuring you can quickly act on your insights within a broader business context.

“SurveyMonkey helps companies get direct feedback from customers using various methods, including surveys and online form-making. It allows companies to use a third party to get customer feedback.” – Brian T, Senior Software Engineer (G2 review)

10. Tableau: Business intelligence and data visualization platform

Tableau is a business intelligence platform that offers aesthetic data visualization. It helps you understand data through customizable, interactive dashboards. Tableau’s dashboards can connect to data from various sources and display information in pie charts, graphs, heat maps, and more.

Other business intelligence platforms like SAP BusinessObjects, Qlik, and Microsoft Power BI offer great analysis and visualization. A business intelligence platform is not a complete analytics solution but can be valuable to your overall stack.

“Creating visually stunning and impactful dashboards is where Tableau truly shines. The array of visualization options, from dynamic charts to interactive maps, allows us to communicate insights in a way that captivates and resonates with our audience. The visual appeal not only enhances presentations but also facilitates a deeper understanding of complex datasets.” – Nitin K, Software Engineer (G2 review)

Collaboration tools

11. Loom: Video recording and sharing tool

Loom is a video tool that enables you to record your screen and camera, share your videos with a link, and add comments to recordings. It saves meeting time and makes communicating more accessible for remote and hybrid teams.

For product managers, it’s handy for sharing and explaining important information, such as new product releases. You can also use it to share product and website tours and to record software training and feedback videos.

“I use Loom all the time to communicate with clients and other people in my network. Super straightforward and works really well both via MacOS app and via Chrome extension. It truly saves me so much time and allows me to make sure that async communication is effective.” – Alberto D, SaaS Growth Consultant (G2 review)

12. Slack: Team messaging and collaboration tool

Slack is the most popular workplace messaging system among product teams. Instant messaging apps like Slack have significantly reduced the number of emails and meetings across workplaces and facilitated accessible communication. You can easily create channels, send direct messages, make video calls, connect with external organizations, and access the interface via the desktop, web, and mobile. Slack is a highly flexible, customizable, scalable solution for any business used by 77% of Fortune 100 companies.

Many PMs choose to create Slack channels dedicated to teams, various projects, and topics of interest, and its ease of integration with other software tools can be precious during the product development process.

“The best thing I like about Slack is that we can create a folder to organize our bookmarks. The second best thing that I like is that we can create a workflow within a Slack Channel. It is straightforward to use. We have integrated and implemented different software like JIRA, GitHub, DBT, and Tableau within Slack.” – Sahil K, Associate Data Science Analyst (G2 review)

Product design tools

13. Figma: Designing and prototyping platform

Figma enables you to create high-quality prototypes that are very close to what the end product will look like. It’s the best way for product teams to create mockups and designs. Once implemented, it’s easy for product managers, designers, developers, and everyone else across the team to use, enabling a seamless flow of information through all phases of development. Like many tools mentioned above, it’s also web-based, so nothing needs to be installed to start designing.

“Figma earns a solid five stars as a state-of-the-art product. It doesn't just meet user expectations; it exceeds them by delivering exactly what designers need without unnecessary or redundant features. Intuitive, user-friendly, powerful, and reliable Figma empowers teams to experiment, be creative, and ultimately be successful.” – Design Manager in Software (Gartner review)

Market intelligence

14. Gartner: Platform for industry research

Gartner is a research and consulting firm that offers valuable resources that product managers can use to access industry insights and research. Its Product Decisions tool provides insight into buyer needs, products, and proprietary research data. This can be vitally important when creating a product strategy and roadmap.

“Gartner is super credible and their analytical resources are very useful. The UI/UX are smooth and help us compare different software easily… It helps in making business decisions and saves so much time/effort that goes into doing research from scratch.” – Employee in Information Technology and Services (G2 review)


Choose the best product management tools for your unique needs

When you’re in the market for a new product management tool, consider what you need for your product, team, and company’s goals. Most tools offer free trials, and some even provide training. When choosing the right tools for your team, consider the following questions:

  • Is the functionality comprehensive enough to do everything you need?
  • Is it easy to use? If there’s a steep learning curve, are you and your team willing to attend training to learn how to use it?
  • Does it integrate with your team's existing software, such as Google Calendar or Slack?
  • Is the cost within your company’s budget?
  • Will this tool be deployed in the cloud, on the desktop, or a product management app, and does it meet your team’s needs?
  • Does it make your life easier by improving how you worked before?
  • Does the tool offer ongoing customer support?

Most PMs use a mix of product management tools that serve different purposes. The key isn’t picking one single platform to do everything. Instead, it’s about creating a product stack of the best software and systems for your workflows to set yourself and your team up for success.

Additional resources for Product Managers

Explore more resources for product managers on the Amplitude blog:

  • Learn more about product management and how to break into the role.
  • Hone your product management skills with Product School webinars, podcasts and groups/communities.
  • From strategy to execution, cover the whole product creation process with this free guide from Infinity.
  • Listen to audio interviews featuring the best product managers while you commute, exercise or relax at home.
  • Read about Amplitude’s PM tech stack.
  • Visit the Amplitude Academy for on-demand product analytics and product management courses.
Get started with Amplitude
About the Author
Image of Mallory Busch
Mallory Busch
Product Marketer, dbt Labs
Mallory Busch formerly ran the Amplitude blog, frequently named a best blog for product managers. She also created AmpliTour, the live workshop for beginners to product analytics and 6 Clicks, the Amplitude video series. She produced the Flywheels Playbook, wrote The Product Report 2021 and produced The Product Report 2022. A former developer and journalist, Mallory's written work and coding projects have been published by TIME, Chicago Tribune, and The Texas Tribune. She graduated from Northwestern University.

More Best Practices