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As a product person, your responsibilities involve so many different things — right from discovery to execution.
And for most of the responsibilities, you need to use tools to make your work efficient.
Not saying that you’ll become an excellent product person only based on the tool. But a good tool will give leverage to your existing skills, and be fun at the same time!
Here’s a list of 16 apps that let you leverage your skills to the fullest (and you might discover an unknown gem):
I use a whiteboard to think or communicate visually in low fidelity. This usually means that I need to draw something quickly, imperfections are tolerable, and you don’t need all the bells and whistles.
Excalidraw is a free, open-source tool that can help you make simple drawings very easily. The best feature is that it has keyboard shortcuts that make whiteboarding seamless.
It’s not great on persistence, templates, and collaboration. For that you should go with Miro or Figjam.
While setting up user interviews, discussion calls with customers, and much more — use a scheduling app.
Calendly makes that seamless. You just share your link with availability and you’re good to go. The free plan is good enough for majority use cases, although you can go with the paid plan for more features like different call types and automation with Zapier.
If you’re in a remote global team that works async, screenshare videos will be your best friend. It’s perfect for sharing decisions, status updates — anything that requires a bit more context than is possible with text.
My tool of choice is Vimeo. It offers more features than Loom in the free plan. It works as a Chrome extension and there’s no limit on the number of videos you can upload.
Collaboration in the form of comments doesn’t work as well as Loom, but that’s the tradeoff. Commenting, in most cases, happen in Slack.
If your team has taken the paid plan of Loom, then that’s a good choice too.
Sometimes the best way to get started with wireframes is to do very low-fidelity sketches, also known as fat marker sketches in the book Shape Up by Basecamp.
I use Notability on the iPad Pro to do this. It has one feature that’s very useful — you can draw a line and hold it to create straight lines.
You can also try out GoodNotes on the iPad or good ole pen and paper.
Undoubtedly Figma. It’s designed to be multiplayer and platform agnostic (browser based). It outscores Sketch becomes of these aspects, and Sketch hasn’t been able to keep up.
There’s no worthy alternative that I would recommend, tbh.
Decks are used internally for example, communicating roadmaps or externally for customer pitches or fundraising.
For pure visual aesthetics — Pitch is amazing. It’s got really good templates that you can use out of the box.
Downsides are that editing the decks sometimes is cumbersome, there are small things that are different from PowerPoint/Keynote/Slides that cause some dissonance.
Alternatives could be Google Slides for simplicity and collaboration
Internal team communication is important to keep everyone updated and on the same page for all work that’s going on.
For all its flaws, Slack is the best communication tool. You just need to optimize it for communication so you don’t spend a lot of time on it.
You should batch process Slack messages, just like you would email. Otherwise, it’s very easy to spend more time in Slack than getting any real work done.
Discord is an alternative for communities and gen Z-led companies.
Task tracking is another thing that a PM looks at. Usually from a lens of seeing how much time it would take to get a feature shipped.
Linear is an app that I use and recommend. It is blazingly fast and feels like a joy to use. You can see the craft that has gone into making it. I even featured it in my Speed as a Feature article.
But since task tracking is a collaborative team effort, other people and teams need to migrate to this tool. So be prepared to put on your influencing hat.
JIRA is the most famous alternative. If you’re much leaner, you can even think of Notion Kanban boards to track dev work.
If you’re in the Apple ecosystem, then Apple Notes is great. If you appreciate networked notes then you will like Obsidian or Logseq. Leave a comment if you would like to see this comparison.
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Thanks to Dhrumi for providing feedback on early drafts of this piece.
Excellent list, Kavir! So helpful!