Top 4 tools to excel at Product Management

Creating a product management toolkit is an integral part of product success. Tools also help to bring structure to the whole process & helps to define the problem statement & managing the flows in an efficient manner. They are a must for a PM to ensure smooth functioning in their role.

Sharing my list of 4 tools:-

#1 ➜ Product Roadmap 🛣️

It’s bread and butter for the PM to navigate and steer each and every conversation with the stakeholders. It is important to have the Product Roadmap template approved by the product stakeholders. PMs own the Product Roadmap & thus the sole responsibility & accountability lies on them in communicating & streamlining the same. Steer away from the assumption that once you create the roadmap, your job is done & all the stakeholders will keep up with the roadmap on their own.

Product Roadmap can be created in google spreadsheet, Microsoft excel, or Notion.

A good Product Roadmap template should include the below columns:-

• Feature name & description
• Jira ticket
• Feature sponsor
• Delivery date
• Stakeholder names ( PM, Project Manager, Design SPOC, Tech SPOC, Analytics SPOC )
• Priority tag

Roadmap communication framework

A Sample Product Roadmap

#2 ➜ User Research 🧙‍♀️

As a PM, the onus lies in you for driving customer obsession across your complete product development lifecycle. Solving customer pain points at each and every touchpoint is the basis of a PM role.

PMs should collaborate with the design team to kickstart the below action items :

• Listen to CX calls 📞
  It’s the quickest and straightforward method to get user insights. Customers are quite vocal about their problem statement and would keenly share their experiences. Make sure you are doing this activity on a regular basis so as to understand the progress made on elevating the user behavior over a period of time.
• In-app feedback 🙉
  Integrating a feedback loop tightly into the product can help to generate quality customer feedbacks. This process ensures that the contextual & granular feedback can be captured at micro touch points of each user interaction. For instance, Curefit does it beautifully by having a feedback form just after finishing the class.
• Conduct Usability tests & concept tests 🧪
  It involves exposing users in front of a prototype or live product, giving them some context, asking them to “think out loud,” and explore the product. It’s a good exercise to get a fair idea about the concept and what are the roadblocks they are facing.

#3 ➜ Release Checklist 📜

PMs day begins with product requirements & ends with stakeholder management. They own the whole product development process as well & the product release checklist acts as a savior for them and helps to create a channel for them to broadcast to the rest of the team members in other functions. Each and every release of yours should pass the release checklist test.

Release checklist items include:

• Signoff from QA team post thorough testing.
• Analytics Dashboard in place to relay success metrics mentioned in PRD.
• Prepared Release notes for internal communication to stakeholders.
• External Product updates communication prepared in collaboration with the marketing team.
• Product FAQs, process change, user guide updated
• Communicated CX team with new process change or feature addition along with required training material.
• Created “What’s New” section note for Google Playstore & Apple Store.

#4 ➜ Product Analytics Dashboard 📊

This can help to contribute immensely to your PM career. Once you get yourself familiarized with the product metrics which you are going to impact, it makes it easy for you to identify your north star metric for your product & corresponding success metric. Sit down with the Product Analytics team & get the dashboard created asap. Try to work closely with them to identify the root cause for certain user behavior and characteristics. Try to map the observed trends with relevant product enhancements as well.

A basic dashboard can include:-

• MAU / DAU
• App Installs
• Sign-ups
• Logins
• Transactions
• New vs Repeat Users
• Conversion Rates
• Drop-Off rates

A Sample Product Analytics Dashboard

Thanks for reading! If you’ve got ideas to contribute to this conversation please comment. If you like what you read and want to see more, clap me some love! Follow here, or connect with me on LinkedIn