Product Management Tools
By accompa on Mar 20, 2009 in Product Management
Hi there - We’ve been on a short hiatus from blogging, as we were working hard to get our Spring 2009 release out on time. We did so on Monday - hooray! 
This is a short post, but we wanted to share this interesting list with you…
It is based on a quick survey we ran to visitors to some pages of our site between Jan-12th and March-16th. We asked the visitors who were in Product Management or Product Marketing to give us a list of tools they use most often to perform their day-to-day tasks.
Here’s the list of top-10 tools in order of their popularity. Please note that #10 is actually one of the product management tools built for product managers (gasp!) 
Product Management Tools
- Microsoft Word
- MRDs, PRDs, business cases, competitive matrices, etc
- Microsoft Excel
- Requirements tracking, Financial analysis, Charts, etc
- Microsoft Powerpoint
- Roadmaps, Customer presentations, Training, etc
- Web Conferencing Tools - Such as WebEx , GoToMeeting
- Bugtrackers - Such as Bugzilla
- Collaborate on bugs with Engineering teams
- Screen Capture and Image Editing Tools
- Online Office Suites - Such as Google Docs
- Largely similar use as Microsoft apps above
- We were surprised these were this popular!
- Wikis
- Collaborate with internal teams (Engineering, etc), as well as Customers
- Survey Tools - Such as Surveymonkey and Surveygizmo
- Customer surveys
- Requirements management tools - Such as Accompa
- We think the presence of these tools in the top-10 list is likely skewed because some of our traffic is from our own customers, and customers of similar software who’re looking to switc
- That said - we think these useful tools are starting to come into their own, and are starting to get adopted by more and more product management and product marketing teams
What are your thoughts on this list? Did we cover all of your frequently-used and favorite tools? If we left any out, which ones? Click here to let us know…
1. Mats | Mar 20, 2009 | Reply
Congrads on your new release! Your list is good. Another popular tool for our PM team is Visio.
2. Jeremy Beck | Jul 20, 2009 | Reply
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To what extent do you think that the product management tool should be integrated into the SaaS product?
To what extent do you think the community driven features should be incorporated?
3. accompa | Jul 26, 2009 | Reply
Jeremy, Thanks for the nice questions. Here’s my thoughts.
* The only “component” of a PM tool that I’d say should be integrated into a SaaS product is the one used to solicit customer feedback and ideas.
* Community-driven feature suggestions should be evaluated the same way the other suggestions would be - i.e. based on benefit to your company & cost to implement.
Let me know your thoughts.
- Raj