7 Product Management Software Tools to Streamline Development

You can find dozens of product management tools that fit SaaS goals.

These tools vary in features, functionality, and pricing. However, one thing is certain: Product management tools are more supportive than ever before.

Find out what product management can best support your software development.

What are product management software tools?

Product management software tools help to guide software development teams through their workflow.

Product management tools can help team members conduct research, create assessments, do iterations, and plan their product launches. Some tools even support roadmapping product development, so they can support agile teams.

Development teams can use roadmapping tools to:

• Streamline product strategy
• Draw up their product plan
• Create their product roadmaps
• Develop user journey maps
• Manage backlogs
• Conduct research on customer needs
• Improve prioritization of product features
• Determine the length of their Scrum sprints
• Analyze data for their product research
• Do process mapping
• Manage product releases
• Improve how agile teams collaborate
• Create new products
• Deliver better products
• Message team members

Using product management tools are ideal when working with remote teams. It is also the solution to increasing collaboration across cross-functional teams.

Many or most of these product management tools also integrate well with existing software, so it’s no big deal to customize existing systems. You can also customize many of these product management tools to meet your product team’s needs.

Here are eight of the most recognizable product software tools available to start your new roadmapping journey.

1. Jira

Jira is typically seen as the best product management software tool for software development. However, many other industries use Jira for roadmapping and managing their projects. This popularity is due to the fact that Jira offers a free plan, but it goes deeper than that.

Jira is the ideal software management tool to use in managing Scrum, Kanban, Waterfall, and other agile methodologies. The user interface is intuitive, making it easy and convenient to use whether you’re a product manager for software or other products. Because it is also a convenient tool, you can use it to assign tasks and manage projects and product development.

Product managers can easily keep track of workflows, agile team responsibilities, and tasks. You get to see where backlogs are building in Scrum or Kanban. You can also manage velocity charts, burndown charts, release burndown and sprint reports with Jira software.

You can also include software like Slack, GitHub, and others to round off your Jira product management tool.

Some of the key features you can anticipate in this software include:

• Visually capturing the product vision to develop better products
• Collaboration tools to keep teams on board in real-time
• Gantt charts to view project and product progress
• A Scrum or Kanban board
• User-friendly roadmaps
• Milestone tracking
• Portfolio management
• Comprehensive Agle reporting
• Extensive automation of the product management process
• The ability to connect codes with issues

In terms of pricing, small businesses often go for the free plan. Jira’s free plan allows 10 users to access roadmapping and other features simultaneously. The paid plan is about $7 monthly for each user.

Agile teams using Jira can benefit from Easy Agile Programs for Jira. It helps teams align on their goals, focus on features and epics, and view dependencies. However, all Easy Agile plugins work with Jira. They simplify everything from PI planning to creating personas and roadmaps.

2. Trello

Trello uses a card system to manage Kanban and other product development workflows. When the administrator sets up the Trello board, product teams get a visual representation of workflows. They can see user stories, who is responsible for tasks, and an overall view of workflow and product life cycles. All these features and others make for an excellent roadmap tool.

The disadvantage of this system is that it doesn’t have a calendar. Another drawback is it offers basic folders for task categorization. It will be difficult to use Trello for Scrum, for example, as you have limited access to folders and there are no subfolders. You can however access multiple user stories to streamline workflows for simple projects.

Despite these drawbacks, Trello does include workflow automation, courtesy of the Butler robot. This little robot feature enables you to set certain rules and calendar triggers so that you can automate repeating assignments. Trello is probably better suited to startups or tracking progress when you have a small salesforce.

Because the Trello platform is simple (but intuitive), team collaboration is convenient. Communicating via Trello is also user-friendly, helping product teams to immediately see who is doing what and task deadlines.

While Trello defaults to the Kanban methodology, you can use it for other project types.

Several features you can look forward to on Trello, include:

• Prioritization of tasks
• Tracking deadlines
• Gantt charts
• Kanban board
• Tools for Agile team collaboration
• Resource and task management
• Automation of workflows
• Tracking team member progress
• Various templates

Trello has a free plan where product managers can use up to 10 boards for each of their teams. You can also purchase the pain plan on a yearly basis, which costs around $10 per user.

3. Wrike

Wrike is as much a tool for streamlining workflows as it is for managing product development. Wrike is flexible, adaptable, and dynamic and is a tool designed for better product decisions.

You can use it for small product management, single client management, or as an enterprise-wide tool for product management. Wrike is also versatile enough to use in software product development or marketing. This platform also has a special tool for marketing, making it easier to manage salesforce operations.

Wrike is customizable, so you can include Gantt charts and Kanban boards to improve team member collaboration. Another function of this platform is its Work Intelligence AI tool which product managers can use for automation and predict product risk.

Wrike works well with Jira, Slack, GitHub, Dropbox, and several other tools. You can also customize other integrations to tailor Wrike for product management teams. If you want to add software which this platform doesn’t support, you can. You simply create the solution you need.

The most prominent features of Wrike are:

• The ability to integrate third-party applications
• Its comprehensive, versatile API
• Managing multiple template options
• Permission and access control
• Importing and exporting data
• Integration of spreadsheets and tables
• Convenient task management
• A user interface for dragging and dropping
• Categorizing and structuring product tasks
• Calendar and timeline control
• Files and documents management
• Tracking activities and progress
• Filtering of data
• Stats and reporting
• Shared or public workspace

Wrike offers a free plan for the use of simple features, but you need to pay about $9.80 a month for each user to access more complex functionality.

4. Productboard

Productboard is right up there with the likes of Zendesk. It provides one of the best features for gathering user feedback. As every software development team knows, user feedback can make or break product success. With this product, you can categorize customer feedback, turn this into valuable information and prioritize this feedback.

Productboard lets you track their feedback during the lifecycle of each product via a portal. This portal supports idea exchange and management, which team members use as inputs to increase product value. This software tool is also great for collecting use cases and understanding user behavior to create the right products for customers.

You can use Slack and email with the Productboard, but if you want additional software integration, you must arrange this yourself. Fortunately, the API in this product is user-friendly to make this happen.

The main features of Productboard include:

• Storehouses for product feedback
• Customer segments that are particularly dynamic
• The ability to prioritize and categorize customer feedback
• Transforming feedback into valuable insights
• A powerful system for value assessment
• Roadmapping tools that you can customize
• Prioritization of tasks

You can get an annual Productboard basic plan at around $20 a month for every user.

5. ProdPad

ProdPad takes the user experience into consideration. It has a lean roadmapping function that you can use to highlight goals and objectives. You can experiment with this product software tool to include user feedback in product development. ProdPad is also known as being among the best product management software tools on the market.

The product roadmap tools are simple to use and include color coding for roadmapping. ProdPad has an easy drag-and-drop feature, privacy settings, and you can use the priority checkpoints as you need.

Development teams can access an ideas management feature to create priority charts. Here, they can see how backlogs influence impact and effort charts in workflows. You can also simply import data from other sources to boost new product development if necessary.

One more feature that characterizes ProdPad is the ability of team members to see associations between user ideas and product development. They can also develop customer lists to question further about their product experiences.

You can collect use cases and understand user behavior better. You can then use all this information as inputs for new product development.

Features that you can expect from this product management tool are:

• Idea generation and capture
• Capture and storage of customer feedback
• Integration with apps that support customer feedback
• Integration with other third-party apps
• Priority charting of ideas
• Lean product roadmaps
• Product roadmapping based on objectives
• Creation of customer portfolios

You can purchase ProdPad’s Essential Plan at about $149 per month for annual billing. This plan allows you to use three administrators or editors for product planning.

6. Asana

Asana is also a useful management platform. You can use it as a solution to roadmap workflows. Asana is popular among small business startups and larger enterprises.

This management solution is cloud-based. It enables team members to share their workspace and assign and track tasks and work progress. Asana is also an excellent platform for team members to collaborate.

You don’t get much customer support with Asana. And, although not ideal for complex team management, Asana has many redeeming features, some of which include:

• Excellent team messaging and collaboration
• Ideal for outlining detailed goals
• Efficient for managing multiple tasks and team members
• A user-friendly dashboard
• Tracking of milestones
• Automation
• Several templates option
• Project planning functionality
• Multiple analytics and reporting options
• Managing resources
• Tracking of time and expenses

Asana has a free plan if you can cope with limited features. Paid plans begin at approximately $10.99 per month for each user. The company bills annually.

7. GLIDR

There are multiple management solutions for streamlining product workflows. GLIDR offers one more platform from which to achieve product software development goals. You can develop detailed product plans that meet customer expectations. GLIDR highlights the customer experience, so places their feedback at the forefront of the best product deliverables.

You can manage product research, use cases, and user behavior on this platform. You can then create product specs, link ideas, create viable user stories, prioritize features, and much more.

GLIDR provides several board view options that help software developers to create themes from ideas. You can also categorize ideas by their status, fill in timelines, or show these ideas on Kanban boards.

Other helpful functions include the ability to integrate apps such as Intercom and Zendesk with GLIDR. You can also link Jira and Trello with this product management software.

Product managers and teams can use GLIDR to streamline their workflows, track product progress, create reports and transform roadmaps into the best products possible.

The primary features of GLIDR include:

• Product canvasses
• Public roadmapping
• Options for research and experimentation
• Trend scores to rank ideas
• Prioritization of features
• Activity feeds
• Progress tracking and monitoring
• User-friendly dashboards
• Reporting that you can export via PDF format

You can test GLIDR for free for 14 days. Then, the cheapest option is about $8 per person, per month for a team of five people. GLIDR bills annually and has three other plan options that give you access to more features.

Up your game with Easy Agile

One way to up your product management software game is to take advantage of Easy Agile resources. You can either use our Jira apps to integrate with existing product management platforms or give your existing system a boost.

Select from apps for Kanban Workflow for Jira or boost product development performance with User Story Maps for Jira.

Up your game with Easy Agile Roadmaps for Jira to guide your team to product success or use our Programs for Jira for Program Increment Planning.

Whichever apps you choose (all of them?), you can improve product team management with the best product management software available.