The Ultimate Guide to Product Manager Tools: From ideation to launch

From brainstorming ideas and prototyping to developing a product strategy and collecting customer feedback (and way too many other tasks and responsibilities to list 😰), product managers have a lot on their plate! That's probably why 51.5% of product managers at agile organizations list "lack of time" as their top challenge.

But that’s where technology can help! (Sometimes).

When product managers use the right tools, today's product managers can streamline their workflows and automate tedious tasks — all while creating a development process that leads to better products.

We've selected seven of the best product management tools to help you run your product team more effectively. Read on to see our top picks across several categories, including the best tools for onboarding new team members, running daily standup, task management, research repository, flowchart creation, and more!

Best tool for agile team meetings: Spinach.io

Did you know that 58% of American workers say attending a doctor's appointment is more enjoyable than attending a work meeting? Yikes. 😬 That sheds a lot of light on the current state of meetings.  And for the 75% of development teams who have a standup meeting 5 days a week (i.e. every single day), you might want to make sure your team isn’t dreading your team meetings worse than the doctor’s office.

Spinach works like an AI Scrum Master to help you run effective standup meetings, sprint planning, retros, and backlog refinement. And getting started is as easy as adding us to your next team meeting. Spinach will join as a passive guest, and afterward, everyone will get a summary of key decisions and follow-ups. Everyone will get personalized to-dos DM'ed in Slack, along with suggestions for new tickets based on what was discussed.

Spinach also has a meeting facilitation feature that helps keep standup meetings short and sweet, with timers that track how long each team member speaks to keep discussions on track. 🎯

With Spinach, standup meetings can be what they were meant to be: a great platform for sharing important information and keeping your team motivated.

Spinach makes daily standup meetings a lot more valuable and enjoyable for you and your product team! Try Spinach on your next standup and see the magic for yourself.

Key features

• Instant summary from every standup available in Slack
• Automated agenda and timer
• Slack reminders that prompt team to fill out their updates before the meeting
• Task assignment and prioritization tools
• Ability to flex between synchronous or asynchronous standup meetings

Integrations

Spinach.io offers integrations with popular project management tools, including:

• Slack
• Jira
• Zoom
• Google Meet

Pricing options

Spinach offers three different pricing options to choose from:

• Free plan for $0 per month
• Business plan for $6 per user per month
• Enterprise plan with custom pricing available upon request

Best task management tool: Wrike

With Wrike, project managers can simplify complex projects by breaking them up into manageable tasks that are easy to create, assign, and track. Wrike also works to organize all important project details, decisions, and updates in one place for streamlined access and collaboration.

With any task management tool, user experience is an important factor — so Wrike's simple user interface earns it a few points. If you're looking for a simple way to manage project tasks for more successful product releases, Wrike is a top contender. 💪

Key features

• Personalized dashboards that are capable of automatically sorting tasks based on due date and priority
• Project milestones to track progress
• Customizable report templates that allow you to create eye-catching, insightful reports in minutes
• In-app collaboration tools for effortless team messaging and communication

Integrations

Wrike offers integrations with over 400 third-party apps, including:

• Mailchimp
• Microsoft SharePoint
• Trello
• Asana

Pricing options

Wrike offers five different pricing plans to choose from:

• Free plan for $0 per month
• Team plan for $9.80 per user per month
• Business plan for $24.80 per user per month
• Enterprise plan with custom pricing available upon request
• Pinnacle plan with custom pricing available upon request

Best tool for video creation & editing: Descript

Descript is one great way to get around meeting fatigue, helping product managers share critical information via video (or podcast!) without disrupting the team’s workflow. The process is super fast, enabling the user to cut and paste text directly from the video transcript.

Sometimes, distributed teams have to get creative with their communications. Too many video calls can get stale — particularly if not every person included in the meeting really has to be there (cue the, “Couldn’t this have been an email?” complaints). Sharing async videos made with Descript can help product managers quickly and easily create and edit new product videos or user feedback videos in a dynamic and engaging package. 👏

Key features

• Quick recorder
• Embeddable video player
• Live collaboration with real-time commenting and live editing
• Templates customized with your company branding
• Stock media (gifs, effects, music, etc.) to keep your videos engaging and interesting
• Cloud storage for optimized collaboration across distributed teams
• Fast and accurate transcription in 22 languages with filler-word removal and overdub

Integrations

Descript offers several integrations with tools like:

• Riverside
• Restream
• SquadCast
• Captivate
• YouTube
• Slack

…And many others!

Pricing options

Descript offers four pricing plans to choose from:

• Free plan for $0 per month
• Creator plan for $12 per user per month
• Pro plan for $24 per user per month
• Enterprise plan with custom pricing

Best tool for UX research and repository: Dovetail

Product managers are responsible for (among many other things) user research: talking to customers and capturing their needs, identifying trends, and collecting UX feedback — and using a tool like Dovetail can help them synthesize that process. 🎯

Dovetail uses analytics tools, synthesis, and summarization features to help product managers make sense of disparate customer research data. It’s flexible and works with a wide range of data, including customer interviews, product feedback, usability testing, survey responses, and market research.

With Dovetail, you can make analysis a collaborative effort, sharing UX insights and leveraging the highlighting and tagging functions to uncover themes that your team can execute on — leading to a better product (and happier customers).

Key features

• Accurate transcripts with automatic speaker detection
• Search feature within videos
• Flexible editing (including bulk editing tool)
• Sentiment analysis that auto-tags in 12 different languages.
• 100+ project templates

Integrations

Dovetail offers seven integrations with third-party apps (with several others available via Zapier):

• Zoom
• Google Drive
• Notion
• Slack
• Jira
• Confluence
• Trello

Pricing options

Dovetail has five pricing plans to choose from:

• Personal plan, free for individuals
• Pro plan starting at $18 per month for one user
• Team plan starting at $375 per month for at least five users
• Business plan starting at $14,000 per year for at least 10 users
• Enterprise plan starting at $50,400 per year for at least 20 users

Best tool for software and development teams: Jira

Software development presents a unique set of challenges. But with the right tools, it’s much easier to see your new software project through to fruition.

Enter Jira.

With Jira from Atlassian, you can use high-quality templates that give you a headstart on your software development project, including scrum templates, kanban templates, bug-tracking templates, and DevOp templates. 

From there, Jira lets you plan your project and break it down into manageable chunks, letting you easily assign tasks, flag issues, and share updates. ✅ Jira also enables users to create customized reports with real-time insights and data visualization tools to provide your development team the context they need to do their jobs effectively.

Managing a software development project without the right development platform can open up a big can of worms. (Or rather, a big can of bugs.🪲) 

With Jira, you can keep your entire development team on track and organized while providing them with the templates and tools they need to streamline the software development process.

Key features

• No-code automation for creating automated project workflows
• High-quality and customizable software development templates
• Customizable reports complete with real-time, visual data

Integrations

Jira offers over 3,000 integrations with third-party apps, including:

• Spinach
• Figma
• Gliffy
• LucidChart
• Slack
• Trello

Pricing options

Jira offers four different pricing plans to choose from:

• Free plan for $0 per month
• Standard plan for $7.75 per user per month
• Premium plan for $15.25 per user per month
• Enterprise plan with custom pricing available upon request

Best tool for flowcharts: Visio

Human beings are visual creatures: 90% of the information transmitted to our brains is visual, and we process images 60,000 times faster than text. 🤯 That's why flowcharts are such a staple in the product development process. 

A high-quality flowchart builder, Visio allows you to create attractive, professional flowcharts in a matter of minutes. Visio is a Microsoft product that offers dozens of pre-made templates, starter diagrams, and stencils for creating flowcharts as well as org charts, network diagrams, fishbone diagrams, floor plans, and a wide range of other charts and diagrams. 

As a Microsoft product, Visio works well with other Microsoft products and may be a simple transition for teams already using the Microsoft 365 suite.

Key features

• Link diagrams to live data from internal and external sources
• High-quality, customizable flowchart templates
• Lets you use your finger or pen to draw/take notes on touch-enabled devices

Integrations

Visio offers 19 integrations:

• LucidChart
• Microsoft OneDrive
• MyDraw
• GroupDocs

Pricing options

Visio offers subscription plans as well as one-time purchase options. Visio's subscription plans include:

• Visio Plan 1 for $5 per user per month
• Visio Plan 2 for $15 per user per month

Visio also offers two one-time purchase options. You can purchase Visio Standard for a one-time price of $309.99 or Visio Professional for a one-time price of $579.99.

Best team member onboarding training tool: Trainual

A product manager's job is a lot simpler when everyone on their team knows what they need to do and how to do it. This makes effective team member onboarding one of the most rewarding investments that a product manager can make. 🤝

With Trainual, you can create customized onboarding programs that practically run themselves, using hundreds of exceptional templates to speed up the processes. 

Trainual also lets you integrate fun features such as videos, GIFs, and screen recordings to keep the team members engaged throughout the onboarding program you create. 

Once a new employee's training is complete, Trainual ensures that they can easily find whatever information they might still need by allowing you to create searchable policies and employee handbooks. Trainual then operates as a central hub for all of your important company info: org chart, knowledge base items (like internal processes), and company mission/values. 🎉

Great training and effective onboarding can head off a lot of common performance issues. If you’re ready to move beyond cookie-cutter webinars and create an engaging, informative, and interactive onboarding program, turn to Trainual.

Key features

• Searchable, trackable employee handbook that lets you push policy changes to everyone with the click of a button
• Hundreds of customizable onboarding/training program templates
• Allows you to embed screen recordings, videos, and GIFs into your onboarding documents

Integrations

Trainual offers 30+ integrations with third-party apps, including:

• Loom
• Teamwork
• Zapier
• Basecamp
• BambooHR

Pricing options

Trainual offers two different pricing plans to choose from:

• Train plan for $99 per month
• Scale plan for $199 per month

Host more productive standups with Spinach

Product management tools can offer a wide range of time-saving product features and functionality, allowing product managers to streamline their day-to-day workflows and keep their entire team on track. 👍

One essential thing that every product manager needs is an AI Scrum Master who is always on time, never misses a meeting, takes notes, and keeps your board up to date— and for that there's no better product on the market for this than Spinach.io! 

To start hosting standup more productive and engaging standup meetings while reducing the manual work involved in facilitating agile meetings, try Spinach today.

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