A framework to help you pick the right product tool

You are a product manager or leader, and you know that some of the tools can help you do your job much better, but there are so many of them to choose from – how do you decide which one is the right one for you?

And these days you are bombarded with the message that “you have to use AI to be a more efficient product person!”, but again, there are so many products for you to choose from!

And it’s not just you, but your entire team that will be affected by that decision. And if you run Product Ops at your organization, part of your job is to choose the best tools for all product teams.

If you tend to go to either a feature comparison of the available tools, or the pricing for each, to make your decision – you are not going deep enough, and you might waste your time and money in implementing a product that is not a good fit for your company.

So what should you do?

For those exact reasons, I put together the Product Manager Toolkit process (available for all on Miro) to help you make better decisions about the tools that will work for you. 

This process came about after years of choosing and trying products for my own stack as a product professional – sometimes with success and sometimes with bitter failure – and after learning from product professionals all over the world about their experiences with different tools through our guest on the Product for Product Podcast (with 130+ episode so far and still learning!).

What is the Product Manager Toolkit?

The Product Manager Toolkit is a structured way for Product Managers, Product Leaders and Product Ops to decide which products to use for their own toolkit and stack.

Treating the process to choose your stack as a product, the toolkit includes a process that starts with identifying the problem you are trying to solve. You probably have multiple problems in your work and you should try to identify all of them to see the full picture.

Then, prioritizing is as important here as anywhere else. Once you know what’s most important to solve, you should shortlist the available products out there. These days there are so many competing solutions for the same problem domain, it is impossible to try all of them.

Once you shortlisted and have a few candidates, compare the tools based on specific criteria that are designed for your organization. This is where the core of the toolkit is – where the comparison criteria are more than just the price or the features of each product. I will expand on this in the next section, for now I’ll just add that companies and teams vary greatly in culture, structure, communication and interactions, and many of the selection criteria rely on that.

After you compare your shortlist, choose the top two (or three if you have time and budget to test more than two) products to test. Testing the products in your own environment is crucial to understand whether it will work for you or not. Remember – what the marketing sites and sales material tell you about each product might not be exactly what will work for you. Your context is extremely important for the success of your product implementation, and you will be able to figure this out only by testing the products.

And lastly, after you tested and made a decision on which product to use, the last step in the process is the implementation. It is as important as any other steps, to put the right efforts in the success of implementing the product into your stack. A product paid for and not used is a waste of money and all the energy put into selecting it.

For each of the steps, the toolkit includes directions on how to do them. As promised, I would like to share the comparison criteria I have included in it.

How to compare products?

For each comparison criteria, you will first determine what is important for your organization, and then use it to decide which product is aligned better with your needs. For example, If your organization prefers tools that goes deep into each problem they solve, you will want to look for such tools, rather than one platform that goes wide and solves many problems, but doesn’t go as deep on each.

These are the comparison criteria to look for:

• Deep vs Wide – is it solving one problem deeply or multiple problems widely, but not as deep for each?
• Entry Level vs Advanced – Is the product considered an entry level tool that most companies adopt when they start, but move to other products as they mature, or is it an advanced one?
• Open Ended vs Deterministic – how flexible do we need the product to be to meet our workflows? Does it need to be flexible, or do we prefer a deterministic one that will help us do things right based on known best practices, and not be able to deviate from that?
• No vs Ongoing engineering required – how much do we want our engineers to be involved in using the product (not just initial integration)?
• Integrations with other products – the level of integration with our existing products, and future products we might add
• User experience – the level of interaction our team have with tools and what type of user experience they will like to use, and will be easy to onboard them
• Security – what security standards we need from our vendors, related to our usage, data etc
• AI support – how does the tool utilize AI, and is it really necessary or seems to be just using a trend.
• Vendor’s culture – what is the vendor’s support and success culture as well as marketing and sales culture , and how does it fit with our expectations. Things like responsiveness, self-service, personalization and human factors would impact how well they will work with you. Product-led culture vs sales-led or technical-led will impact the future of the product to still fit your needs.
• Price – matching to our budget but also availability of free tiers or periods to test and the ROI investing in it.
• Features comparison – Last for a good reason, we should still compare features to see what we get. Include also what limitations you might have, and any additional cost that comes with some features.

Where does AI get in the picture?

AI can be treated as a feature in any of the selected items, or as a tool on it’s own, and should be treated in the same way as selecting any other tool – does it solve a real problem, and what is the priority to solve it now?

In addition, you can use AI tools to help you shortlist the products that could be a good fit for you. With a good promport, try your favorite GenAI friend to find several products that would be a good fit for your needs.

One thing you don’t want to leave for the AI to do, is determine for you which product is best for your organization. The context and deeper understanding of how you all work together is the knowledge you need to own the right decisions.

Bonus usage!

One last point to make is that the Product Manager Toolkit, can be used – with some adjustments, as your tool to compare and analyze your competitors. After all, your clients might also apply a similar process to choose the solution they need for their problem, and if your product is one that compete with other solution, you might find it valuable to understand how it compares, and why would clients choose it.

Use the toolkit

You can find the Product Manager Toolkit on Miroverse – follow this link.

I would love to hear feedback and improve the toolkit