Today, the importance of a robust product technology stack cannot be understated. Choosing the right tools for your team is a feat that might require some amount of trial and error before you can land on what works best for you. Luckily, you have this blog to help guide you through this process!
The technology stack of a company or team can be defined as the assemblage of all the tools, softwares, programming languages, frameworks, libraries and other technologies that shape the way they function.
You might think the saying “work smarter, not harder” is easier said than done, but not a lot of us abide by it in the real world. Technology stacks are a great indicator of how a company or team goes about accomplishing their goals. Choosing the right one for you is the first step towards “working smarter”.
The following list will allow you to assess what tools best suit your needs and give you a good idea of where you and your team stand in terms of preparedness and productivity. From collaboration tools to roadmapping software, find out where your team can churn out that little bit extra that goes a long way.
6 Tools That Will Help Take Your Product Technology Stack To The Next Level
1. Roadmapping
Planning for the road ahead and sticking to a well defined timeline is how product teams ensure they stay on their toes. By making sure that everyone on the team is doing the best they can, achieving set targets and goals in a timely manner, rest assured, you’re on the path to success.
Roadmapping tools enable product teams to chalk out clear-cut product strategies with specific timeframes for each step of the way. With a goal-oriented approach that allows you to track your progress and develop your product on a priority basis, you can plan each milestone towards creating the perfect product.
ProductPlan
ProductPlan is a roadmapping tool with shareable and customizable master plans, visualizations, timelines and boards that make for an easy and effective planning experience. The tool further allows you to assign specific team members to individual time-bound duties that work towards achieving collective goals. With neat visualizations and planning boards, you can easily see where you stand and plan for the future accordingly.
An easy-to-use interface and a generous amount of third-party integrations allows you to create detailed plans customized to suit your needs and ensure that your team is always one step ahead of the game. Other features include email and third-party notifications to keep your team up-to-date, metrics to track progress and hold members accountable, and reports, slides and presentations for calls and meetings. Worthy alternatives: Aha!, Craft.io, Productboard.
2. Analytics
As a product manager, analytics can be a key component of your daily work routine. Thanks to technology today, product managers don’t have to sleep with one eye open anymore. With tools running on autopilot, perpetually gathering and analyzing product data and turning it into actionable reports, you as a project manager have your work cut out for you.
Great foresight is known to be a product manager’s best friend. Analytics tools allow you to take informed data-driven product decisions and efficiently delegate duties to your team members on-the-go. While Google Analytics is a great all-round tool, it isn’t necessarily designed to suit the needs of product managers who require a greater deal of specificity towards product development and strategy.
Amplitude
With reliable AI capabilities, Amplitude constantly analyzes your product data and predicts future trends that may affect your product. With the foresight of data-driven analysis of the ins and outs of your product, you now get to make linchpin decisions and stay well ahead of the game.
Amplitude further records user interactions and demarcates them into actionable behavioral data that can help you frame your product development and strategy. Harnessing the power of data allows you to develop your product in accordance with the needs of your customers, ensuring that they stay happy. Although Amplitude is not the most user-friendly, it’s well worth getting familiar with the tool. Worthy alternatives: Heap.
3. Collaboration & Project Management
Working as a team has always been the best way to bring the most out of your product. As a project manager, you might be tasked with having to conjure up that collaborative spirit amongst the members of your team. Collaboration and project management tools are a great way to induce a collaborative spirit among members.
Shared projects, resources, documents and data breed a sense of shared responsibility, allowing team members to collectively cross-check, filter through and modify the same. This ensures that the product you put out is well spoken for by your team as a whole.
Trello
With collaborative workspaces in Trello, product teams can work together on shared projects, resources, documents and data ensuring that a good amount of internal filtration takes place before putting out your final product. Boards can be set up to include comments, attachments, due dates which can be assigned to different members of a team with email and third-party notification being sent to respective members.
Trello also allows you to organize content with tags, labels and categories enabling you to easily find what you need, when you need it. It’s interface is easy on the eyes and the brain and can make your work look a lot more interesting than it actually is. With automations, checklists and app integrations, Trello gives you the ability to plan your way into successful product launches. Worthy alternatives: Confluence, Asana.
4. Surveys
Surveys are a powerful tool for product teams to gauge customer feedback and address issues with their product. Surveying existing customers can point you in the exact direction, revealing glitches, deficiencies and drawbacks faced by customers using your product. Surveys can also point you towards new avenues, helping you redefine your product based on what the market demands. Using survey tools is the easiest way to record and analyze customer feedback and market responses.
SurveyMonkey
SurveyMonkey is a steadfast, easy-to-use survey tool that allows you to quite straightforwardly create surveys and send them out to specifically targeted respondents. You can create your surveys using templates, logic and sample questions crafted by experts in the field.
You also have the ability to precariously pick out your sample size based on factors such as demographics, firmographics, psychographics and technographics among 50 other variables. A note to make is that SurveyMonkey will charge you based on the desired qualification rate of the respondents that you choose.
5. Communication
Inter-team communication plays a pivotal role in shaping the outcomes of a team that is as versatile as that of the product team. Made up of members that are required to be in constant liaison with each other, a channel of swift and succinct communication must be in place. This is so that the collective expertise of the team can be accurately reflected in your product strategy and development.
Slack
A staple across a majority of organizations today, Slack happens to be a comprehensive tool for communication within an organisation. Slack allows you to seamlessly connect with colleagues, enabling you to share messages, reminders, documents and other attachments. You can further create shared channels not just limited to employees within your organization but also intra organizational channels that allow collaborations and joint efforts.
With instant messaging, voice and video calls, you can reach any colleague within a moment’s notice. Other features include seamless file sharing, an intuitive search, workflow automation and a wide variety of third-party app integrations. Worthy alternatives: Front, Flock.
6. A/B Testing
A/B testing is a great tool to test out different versions of your product in real time with your customers indirectly making the decision for you. These tools allow you to compare the performance of two different user experiences (webpage designs or app interfaces) A and B. This is done by showing real-time visitors the A and B versions of these user experiences at random while gauging their experiences to see which performs better. A/B testing can therefore be an extremely reliable tool that ensures the product you put out is to your customers liking.
Optimizely
Optimizely is an A/B testing tool that allows you to test different product strategies, interfaces and experiences in random, across real-time audiences on the basis of behavior. Following the real-time tests, the tool gathers crucial data about which strategy, interface or experience is the most effective for your target audience. A worthy alternative: Google Optimize.
Make An Informed Decision!
Good or bad, your outcomes may be a reflection of your technology stack or rather a lack of one therein. As a product manager, achieving a proper balance between manpower and technology can enable your team to cut out unnecessary, monotonous processes that eat away resources, time and effort. This allows you and your team to focus only on what you do best, leaving the rest to the capable hands of data-driven tools designed to deliver. Tools help your team build a strong sense of camaraderie across projects. This ensures that the work you put out is of the highest quality.
To get to know the who’s who of product management tools and obtain more in detail tool comparisons, be sure to check out our free technographics tool.
