post

Footer About

Footer Contribute

Footer Get Involved

Footer Links

Mind the Product

Guest post

Why having engineering experience helps in product management 

Product Strategy

How Bain & Company adapted its product strategy for AI: Kasia Mrowca (Director of Product) — Product Unplugged

B2B product management

Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML)

Building Product Teams

Business Strategy

Data Driven Product Management

Digital Transformation

Diversity and Inclusion

Minimum Viable Product

OKRs

Prioritisation

Product Design

Product Research

Product Development Process

Product Ethics

Product Discovery

Product Leadership

Product Management Career

Stakeholder Management

🌎 <a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/world-product-day/" style="color:#FFFFFF;text-decoration:underline;">Happy World Product Day!</a> Be sure to celebrate product, yourself, and your peers today! 🎉

Context, intent, change, purpose, constraints – a model for communicating requirements

5 difficult conversations and how to have them

DoorDash eats Deliveroo while OpenAI makes its biggest buy: this week’s news roundup

Why great product managers think like therapists

Tools and techniques to scale product teams – Charlotte King (Lead Product Manager, eBay)

Product manager and business developer at Telenor, focused on creating new digital services. Entrepreneur, and passionate about innovation and building great stuff.

Linda Johannessen

<p>In this talk from ProductTank Oslo, Janna Bastow focused on practical advice: What tools should you use as a product manager, and how do you use them?</p>
<p>As a product manager you have different areas that all need their own set of tools, such as design, customer success, analytics, product and overall efficiency. Good tools will have integrations with each other, helping you get an overall view, manage your development and make good decisions. The reality many PMs are facing is tools lack integration, features you don’t really need, a high cost, and low usability. When the best we can hope for is a compromise between those factors, many teams end up building their own tools to suit their specific needs.</p>
<p>Luckily, Janna Bastow from ProdPad gave us a practical guide to the existing tools that she herself uses (or has used), with tips on which to use for different product management tasks:</p>
<h2><strong>Design</strong></h2>
<p>These tools aren&#8217;t intended to turn you into a design master, or to let you replace your UX specialist &#8211; they&#8217;re intended to help you quickly test ideas and designs, and create meaningful mock-ups that you can build valuable conversations around.</p>
<ul>
<li>A real, physical notebook with a dot grid, for sketching</li>
<li><a href="https://moqups.com/">Moqups.com</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.adobe.com/uk/products/photoshop.html">Adobe Photoshop</a></li>
<li>Html/css prototyping skills (and the &#8220;inspect element&#8221; option in your browser)</li>
</ul>
<p>Worth checking out: <a href="https://www.sketchapp.com/">Sketch</a>, <a href="https://marvelapp.com/">Marvel</a>, <a href="https://www.invisionapp.com/">Invision</a>, <a href="https://www.uxpin.com/">UXPin</a>, <a href="https://balsamiq.com/">Balsamiq</a></p>
<h2><strong>Customer success</strong></h2>
<p>Helping your customers get the most out of your product isn&#8217;t always an easy task. When you first start out, you can probably manage with a shared inbox across the whole team, and a rota for who&#8217;s responsible for answering emails. However, if your product is successful, you&#8217;ll quickly find you need some specific tools to help you do a great job at customer success.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.zendesk.com/">Zendesk</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.appcues.com/">Appcues</a> &#8211; in app message inbox, great for user onboarding</li>
<li><a href="https://www.frontleaf.com/">Frontleaf </a>(recently <a href="https://www.zuora.com/product-3/insights/">acquired by Zuora</a>) &#8211; customer insights</li>
<li><a href="https://www.getdrip.com/">Drip </a>&#8211; for persona specific emails,</li>
<li><a href="http://mailchimp.com/">MailChimp</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Worth checking out: <a href="https://www.intercom.io/">Intercom</a>, <a href="https://www.drift.com/">drift</a>, <a href="http://www.pendo.io/">pendo</a>, <a href="https://inlinemanual.com/">Inline Manual</a>, <a href="https://customer.io/">Customer.io</a>, <a href="http://www.totango.com/">Totango</a>, <a href="http://www.preact.co.uk/">Preact</a>, <a href="https://sendgrid.com">SendGrid</a>.</p>
<h2><strong>Analytics</strong></h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://analytics.google.com/">Google analytics</a></li>
<li><a href="https://keen.io/">Keen.io</a></li>
<li><a href="https://amplitude.com/">Amplitude</a></li>
<li><a href="https://chartmogul.com/">ChartMogul</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Worth checking out: <a href="https://mixpanel.com">Mixpanel</a>, <a href="https://looker.com/">Looker</a>, <a href="https://kilometer.io/">Kilometer</a>, <a href="https://modeanalytics.com/">Mode</a>, <a href="https://www.hotjar.com/">Hotjar</a>, <a href="https://www.localytics.com/hello/">Localytics</a>.</p>
<h2><strong>Product Backlog</strong></h2>
<p>One of the sharp insights Janna shared in her talk was the distinction between a <em>product</em> backlog and a <em>dev</em> backlog. Specifically, the product backlog is where all the ideas and feature suggestions and bugs that need fixing should go to be assessed, tracked, and prioritised. Anything that the product team decide is worth acting on should <em>then</em> go the dev backlog.</p>
<p>To that end, <a href="https://www.prodpad.com/">ProdPad</a>, Janna’s own tool, helps you with idea-gathering, feedback management, portfolio management, roadmapping and spec’ing.</p>
<h2><strong>Sanity</strong></h2>
<p>There&#8217;s no specific place that these tools fit in the toolbox &#8211; they&#8217;re just the tools that Janna has found to be consistently useful in making her life easier, and which have become her &#8220;defaults&#8221;</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.dropbox.com">Dropbox</a></li>
<li><a href="http://drive.google.com">Google drive</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.google.com/chrome/">Chrome</a></li>
<li><a href="https://slack.com/">Slack</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.getcloudapp.com/">CloudApp</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.lastpass.com">LastPass</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.zapier.com">Zapier</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.trello.com">Trello</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Whether you already have tools in place, or you&#8217;re just getting to the point where you think you need something purpose-built to make your life easier, check out some of Janna&#8217;s recommendations and see if there&#8217;s anything that could help you build better products!</p>

core/freeform

Software Experience Management

Turning customer success into product success by Hannah Chaplin and Niamh Jones

How to Pick the Right Tools for your Experiments by Thomas Leitermann

APIs and Open Technology by Jeremy Brown

The Day-To-Day Product Management Toolkit

ProductTank Vilnius

ProductTank Malmö

ProductTank Abu Dhabi

ProductTank Phoenix

ProductTank Genève

ProductTank London

ProductTank Porto

ProductTank Victoria

ProductTank México City

ProductTank Pune

ProductTank Hyderabad

ProductTank Valencia

ProductTank Auckland

ProductTank Helsinki

ProductTank Barcelona

ProductTank Wellington

ProductTank San Diego

ProductTank Canberra

ProductTank Perth

ProductTank Hong Kong

ProductTank Bangkok

ProductTank Doha

ProductTank Tel Aviv-Yafo

ProductTank Reston

ProductTank Raleigh

ProductTank Charlotte

ProductTank Washington

ProductTank Richmond

ProductTank Cluj-Napoca

ProductTank Zagreb

ProductTank Edinburgh

ProductTank Paris

ProductTank Hamburg

ProductTank München

ProductTank Manchester

ProductTank Bristol

ProductTank Oxford

ProductTank Madrid

ProductTank Des Moines

ProductTank Dallas

ProductTank Portland

ProductTank Curitiba

ProductTank Chicago

ProductTank Philadelphia

ProductTank Los Angeles

ProductTank Gdansk

ProductTank Stuttgart

ProductTank Pittsburgh

ProductTank Bangalore

ProductTank Chennai

ProductTank Mumbai

ProductTank Fribourg

ProductTank Norwich

ProductTank Zürich

ProductTank Jacksonville

ProductTank Florianópolis

ProductTank Tallinn

ProductTank Denver

ProductTank San Francisco

ProductTank Sheffield

ProductTank Tokyo

ProductTank Columbus

ProductTank Belfast

ProductTank Montréal

ProductTank Seattle

ProductTank Lausanne

ProductTank Reading

ProductTank Bielefeld

ProductTank Frankfurt

ProductTank Bonn