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Last Updated on February 24, 2023 by Mandy Schmitz
Are you looking for product management software to help you seamlessly manage your products? Well, you are in the right place.
Product management is not always easy. But, if you are constantly dealing with missed budgets, employee burnouts, and blown budgets, then it’s time you got yourself a platform to assist you.
Your small business needs a product solution to facilitate the successful development and launching of products.
Wondering what the best product management software is for you?
This article reviews the top five product management software and their features to help you choose.
Let’s dive in.
What is Product Management Software?
Table of Contents
Product management software is an organizational tool used to rapidly and efficiently design and improve a company’s products.
Hence, these tools enable product managers and their teams to gather new ideas and create detailed plans for turning those ideas into finished products.
Although product managers and teams are the primary users of these tools. In addition, they also provide improved accountability and insights on product development to other departments, including marketing and sales.
Types of Product Management Software
Product management software comes in three types as follows.
1. Single-Purpose
This product management software focuses on a single central aspect rather than a range of core topics. As a result, it makes it easier to follow conversions and keeps the participants more focused. Hence, there’s no need to waste time and resources juggling activities when they are fewer to focus on at once.
2. Product Management Suites
In comparison to single purpose software, it integrates the features into a single, easily accessible platform. Having all resources in one place eliminates the need to invest in different and sync them around the organization. Consequently, this saves you money on training while still encouraging time management and team unity.
3. Unified Communications
It’s a collaboration suite that is being set up. Therefore, it aims to combine interaction-focussed applications with resources that can work simultaneously. It incorporates email and VoIP technologies and features.
Generally, a product management software can help you perform the following tasks:
- Prototyping
- Defining a product roadmap
- User journey mapping
- Customer research
- Product road mapping
- Feature prioritization
- Managing sprints
- Analyzing product data
- Process mapping
- Managing product releases
Which is the Best Product Management Software?
The best product management software will help you promote the productivity and efficiency of your business by allowing you to conceptualize, develop, design, and do marketing for newly created products.
Here is our top selection of the best product management software in 2021:
1. Jira Software
Jira is an application lifecycle management solution birthed by Atlassian Company and designed to help users plan, track, release, and report.
In particular, agile teams use it to manage every stage of their workflow, from planning, shipping, and finally to release. Besides, this product management software has a simple user intuitive that allows easy collaboration.
It comes with native roadmaps that help teams track the big picture. In addition, its no-code automation engine helps to save time by automating tasks and processes with just a few clicks. This product management software is best for teams using Scrum and Kanban methodologies.
Key Features
Scrum and Kanban boards: The software provides powerful, agile views utilizing Scrum and Kanban boards. By fostering a collaborative community, the Scrum system allows software teams to handle complex tasks.
The Jira Scrum board is a tool that brings people together around a common goal and encourages iterative, gradual growth.
In addition to the Jira Scrum Board, Kanban boards give your team complete insights on what’s coming next, allowing you to achieve maximum performance within the shortest time possible.
Hence, these are great features that help save time as all communication regarding a project happens from a single place.
Backlog: This allows development teams to prioritize a prioritized list of work derived from the roadmap. It lists the essential items at the top as such groups know what to deliver first.
For the most part, this feature gives a place to organize your sprints. In addition, it makes release and iteration plans easier.
Agile reporting: This allows teams to access multiple pre-built reports that provide real-time actionable insights into how their team moves from sprint to sprint. In addition, it helps save time as users can quickly obtain necessary reports.
Customizable workflows: Jira allows users to create their custom workflows to help them keep track of projects and tasks. It’s a great feature as it helps save costs by ensuring that tasks get completed within time.
Roadmaps: Lastly, this allows you to create a clear vision of your developing product, giving your team direction and a path to follow. It helps sketch the big picture, coordinate plans with all stakeholders, and make sure your roadmap connects to your team’s work in just a few clicks.
It helps ensure that all tasks are achieving a common goal.
Pros
- Allows fast task tracking
- It has a vast number of integrations
- Great customization capabilities
- It has a user-friendly interface
- Extremely configurable
Cons
- Hard to set up for the first time
- Has a steep learning curve
- It can be costly based on the number of users
Integrations
Users can further enhance Jira Software with thousands of apps available in the Atlassian Marketplace. These include Bitbucket for development workflow, confluence for knowledge management, Bamboo for continuous integration, Tempo Timesheets, and Zephyr.
In addition, this product management software also supports integration with other companies, including Google, Slack, Zoom, Microsoft, etc.
Pricing Plans
| Plan | Price |
| Free | $0 |
| Standard | $7/ user average, $70 a month |
| Premium | $14/user average, $140 a month |
| Enterprise | Billed Annually |
Free plan
Allows up to 10 users and offers Scrum and Kanban boards, backlog, agile reporting, customizable workflows, apps, and integrations.
Standard plan
Allows up to 10,000 users per site.
Premium plan
It supports global and multi-projects.
Enterprise plan
This allows for custom pricing with the client.
Data Center plan
This is for companies that prefer to self-host. Pricing is dependent on the number of users. For example, a company with 500 users can pay up to $ 42,000 yearly.
Click here to get Jira Software and start your free trial.
2. Aha.io
It is a product roadmap software that helps product managers and marketing teams define the why, what, and when of products before creating them. Particularly, product managers can make the strategy and visual roadmaps for their product launch and features.
Furthermore, it helps users develop a strategy, capture ideas, connect it to the teams, and create details. Similarly, manage release, prioritize operations, design, and easily share visual roadmaps with customers and colleagues.
The product management software uses a company-based portal where team members submit their thoughts, upload pictures and presentations to capture ideas. Lastly, it supports both scrum and agile workflows.
Key Features
The key features of this software include
Product roadmap: This allows users to develop strategies, crowdsourcing for new and viable ideas, and design visual product plans. Therefore, it is an excellent feature as it helps you create and deliver the type of products wanted by your customer base.
Project roadmap: This is another helpful feature that helps ensure the successful completion of tasks by individuals and teams within the agreed time and cost.
Service roadmap: This allows you to develop clear and viable ideas for new product offerings, promote existing services, and coordinate the delivery of your services. It’s a great feature as it enables you to deliver the right services needed by your clients.
Pros
- Offers a comprehensive set of tools for tracking work from initiation to completion
- Allows for a simple combined visual plan of work breakdown
- Allows customization
- Great integration with several other tools
- Excellent collaboration abilities
- Provides visualization of project timelines
Cons
- Complicated configuration process
- Complex integration
- Requires a bit of learning to become proficient
- Not so good bug tracking
- Notes section requires improvement
Integrations
This product management software has integrations with over 30 sales, development, collaboration, and support tools. It includes Jira, Microsoft teams, SalesForce, Google Analytics, Azure DevOps, Zendesk, popular calendar software, and many more.
Besides, they currently integrate with Atlassian Confluence and Rally Milestones. Its REST API is used with any programming language as well.
Pricing plans
Roadmaps
Aha.io has the following plans under the roadmaps’ suite:
| Plan | Price |
| Startup | Check to qualify |
| Premium | $59 user/month |
| Enterprise | $99 workspace owner or contributor / month |
| Enterprise + | $149 workspace owner or contributor / month |
Start-up package
It is available only by a quote for early-stage businesses and organizations with a limitation of 5 users.
Premium
This comes with the ability to create plans, build roadmaps, prioritize work, gather feedback, report on progress, and share presentations.
Enterprise
The plan has all features in the premium plan plus unlimited reviewers and viewers.
Enterprise plus
It goes at an annual cost per workspace owner or contributor.
Idea
The software also offers a package for a complete product management suite. It comes in two plans:
| Plan | Price |
| Essential | $39 user/month |
| Advanced | $59 user/month |
Essentials
It requires a minimum of 3 users.
Advanced
It requires a minimum of 3 users as well.
Get started with aha.io today.
3. Productboard
Productboard is a cloud-based customer-driven product management software that helps teams provide the right products to the market quickly.
It gives a complete solution to product teams, enabling them to understand user needs, prioritize what to build next, align every team member on the roadmap, and engage with their customers.
This easy-to-use software allows company-wide collaboration and integrates into existing workflows flawlessly. In addition, it helps bring together materials that facilitate more effective product development decisions.
It enables agile product managers to utilize data and insights to develop and launch customer-focussed product roadmaps.
Key Features
Feedback: This allows users to consolidate customer feedback from any source to a single repository. Hence, this feature is excellent as it enables product managers to identify trends around customers’ needs.
Prioritization: It allows you to see what customers need the most and prioritize the features that they want the most. Hence, it is great as it helps to ensure product objectives support company goals.
Roadmaps: This enables users to align every team member around the roadmap and share. It helps improve cross-functional collaboration.
Engagement: With this product management software, you can validate feature ideas, share updates, and capture new ideas from your customers in a public portal. As a result, it helps in building products that drive revenues.
Pros
- Great road mapping and planning features
- High ranking and sorting capabilities
- Good collaboration ability
- Highly flexible as it allows you to organize your products and features in any way you like
- It has a friendly user interface
Cons
- It’s too costly per seat
- Has no way of tracking and managing projects
- It can be tricky to get started.
- Need for better integrations
Integrations
Productboard allows integration with various other product management software. These include, among others, Jira, GitHub, Trello, Azure DevOps, and Pivotal Tracker, which are all development integrations.
Furthermore, it also has customer insights integrations like Intercom, Zendesk, Slack, Zapier, SalesForce, email, and Gainsight. In addition, partner integrations including Typeform, Mattermost, Frame.ai, Tray.io, and Gong are also incorporated.
Pricing Plans
| Plan | Price |
| Essentials | $20/ make per month |
| Pro | $50/ make per month |
| Scale | $100/ make per month |
| Enterprise | Custom |
This product management software has four plans as follows:
Essential plan
It comes at a monthly cost of per maker and allows you to create and collaborate on roadmaps easily.
Pro plan
With a per-maker cost, this plan lets you connect customer feedback to roadmaps.
Scale plan
It costs per maker and allows users to align business objectives and product strategy.
Enterprise plan
It comes with custom pricing allowing users to run enterprise product management organizations.
Click here to try out Productboard and start your free trial.
4. airfocus
airfocus is a project management software solution for prioritization and road mapping. Hence, it seeks to assist decision-makers in determining their goals and creating more accurate roadmaps.
In brief, it’s a SaaS that helps teams and managers make strategic decisions, communicate goals, delegate tasks, monitor progress and timelines while promoting transparency.
It’s a simple program that lets you create and prioritize roadmaps, collaborate on strategy, and manage various products and advanced workflows all in one place.
Furthermore, utilizing this software, teams can focus on the suitable projects, initiatives, and efforts relevant to a company’s growth, customers, products, or services.
Key Features
Robust uses prioritization: This product management software makes use of a customizable scoring board that allows users to prioritize features and initiatives based on a predefined set of value and cost. Hence, it is a great feature as it helps you make the right product decisions.
Effective road mapping: This tool helps you build successful road maps that clearly articulate your product strategy. It uses kanban boards and timeline roadmaps to achieve this. In addition, it helps communicate your plan on your roadmap.
Seamless collaboration allows team members to effectively communicate, easily view, and give feedback on a single platform. Thus, it helps you to build better products faster with strong team collaboration.
Pros
- Effortless integration with other tools
- It comes with a user-friendly design
- Easy to set up and use
- It comes with highly customizable templates
Cons
- Relatively expensive
- Timeline view not visually appealing
- It lacks a dependency feature
- The free trial has limited features
Integrations
This software integrates with multiple project management and developer tools like Jira, Trello, Asana, Azure DevOps, Basecamp, GitHub, and many others.
Want to know more? Check out our in-depth reviews of Asana or Zoho Projects.
Pricing Plans
| Plan | Price |
| Starter | $19/month |
| Team | $39/ per editor per month |
| Pro | $79/ per editor per month |
| Enterprise | Custom |
This product management software offers the following pricing plans:
Starter plan
It has a limitation of a single user. However, it allows users to use all prioritization features, create a kanban roadmap and unlimited documents.
Team plan
The plan includes all features in the starter plan plus five contributors, Gantt timeline roadmap, unlimited viewers, integration with Trello, Asana, Zapier, Jira, and others.
Pro plan
It comes at a monthly cost per editor and includes everything in the two other plans. Also, it provides integration to the Jira server and Azure DevOps, 20 contributors, access to master workspaces, etc.
Enterprise
It calls for custom pricing with the client and comes with unlimited features.
Click to get airfocus and start your free trial.
5. Craft.io
Craft.io is a product management software that helps product managers do their work from feedback capturing, road mapping, decision making, and planning all in a single purpose tool.
Besides, it gives product managers a reliable database to back up critical product decisions. Thus, helping them be more optimistic, influencing customers, and leading with authority.
Craft.io has powerful sharing and collaboration features creating a transparent environment that motivates organizations to design better products that customers want.
Subsequently, it helps product managers discover ideas, come up with story maps, collaborate on projects, and create product prototypes.
Key Features
Roadmapping: This enables product teams to build customized roadmaps that flawlessly connect strategy and functionality. By linking plans to implementation with views, teams can visualize how goals and critical results apply to specific features.
Strategic inputs: The product management software has a feature that allows teams to document product strategy and connect it to execution. Thus, teams can create a central place for all product data and link each component to the planning process.
Prioritization: Lastly, this facilitates prioritization and sharing of decisions among product teams. As a result, the program allows teams to prioritize utilizing the best practices that help to build and preserve organizational cohesion confidently.
Pros
- It’s a one-stop-shop for product management with multiple capabilities in an easy-to-use program
- Presents a well-integrated feature set
- Keeps all members on the same page with a clear sprint backlog and milestones
- A Relative short learning curve
Cons
- Difficult integration with Jira
- Limited native integrations
- Implementation is time-consuming
- Prone to bugs
Integrations
Craft.io integrates with several other product management software, including Jira, Azure DevOps, Github, Pivotal Tracker, Gitlab, Google Drive, Dropbox, Zapier, Okta, Target process, SAML, Google workspace, PingIdentity, and Intercom.
Pricing Plans
| Plan | Price |
| Essential | $39/month |
| Pro | $89/ per month |
| Enterprise | Custom |
In particular, this product management software has the following plans.
Essential plan
It is suitable for small companies and product teams. Furthermore, it includes unlimited products, story mapping, Kanban board, product roadmap builder, integration with development tools, and others.
Pro plan
Ideal for mid-sized and has all features in the essential plan and unlimited contributors and viewers, Live share, Idea portal, and integration with CRM tools.
Enterprise
It allows for custom pricing and comes with unlimited features.
Get started with Craft.io and for your free trial.
How Do You Use Product Management Software?
Generally, setting up product management involves the following stages:
1. Vision development
You need to develop a product vision that acts as the road sign and the destination. It helps define the final product and describes the way to achieve it. It involves setting the product goals and defining specifications.
2. Strategy development
Particularly, it involves defining the main features, the users and their needs, and the key performance indicators that the product must meet.
3. Execution and testing
This is where the product team works on its product. Hence, it involves coming up with a new product or adding new features to an existing product. In brief, the primary phases in this stage are product development, internal and external testing, and the application of feedback reports.
4. Marketing and sales
Generally, this is where customer awareness occurs, pricing strategies are defined, and adequate release time is determined.
5. Tracking product metrics
This involves monitoring the product’s progression and analyzing data to determine the product’s success.
Over to You
Well, there you have it all. The five best product management software that will make your work easier. Furthermore, we hope this compilation will help you choose the right tool for your product management needs. So go ahead and make your choice.
Still not sure what to go for? No worries. Why don’t you give our top choice Jira software a try?
It’s because it comes with excellent road-mapping abilities and a highly user-friendly dashboard that allows fast implementation.
Above all, this powerful solution presents vital planning, tracking, road mapping, and releasing features to help create and launch the right products that customers need.
Additionally, its easy-to-use interface makes it simple to implement and use even without prior experience.
As always, feel free to reach out to us in case of any queries or hiccups. We will be glad to help.
Try Jira Software now
