Best Product Management Internal Tools for 2023

Even for seasoned businesspeople, the question “What is product management?” comes up rather frequently. One reason is that many different roles are involved in product management. The function itself has very distinct meanings in various organizations.

Product management is an organizational function that directs each phase of the lifespan of a product, from development to positioning and pricing, by placing the customer and the product first. Product managers represent customers’ interests within the company and ensure that the voice of the market is audible to create the most excellent product possible.

The practice of strategically directing each stage of the product life cycle, from conception and development to testing and positioning, is known as product management. The goal is to create technically sound products that meet both user needs and corporate goals.

According to a well-known Martin Eriksson quotation, product management occurs “at the confluence between business, technology, and user experience.”

The most effective product managers are pioneers. You direct a product’s success and oversee the cross-functional team enhancing it. It is a crucial organizational function, particularly in technology firms. Product managers offer the knowledge required to steer and make strategic product decisions.

The responsibilities of a product manager range widely from strategic to tactical. Because of this, product managers frequently serve as the hubs connecting the engineering, marketing, sales, and support teams with the customer base. 

Although it has been suggested that product managers act as “mini CEOs” for their products, that is not entirely true. Product managers succeed at uniting teams around a common knowledge of consumer challenges because they are product leaders within their enterprises.

Product teams consistently deliver better-designed and higher-performing products due to this customer-centric emphasis. A deep understanding of clients and the capacity to develop solutions specifically for them are more important than ever in the digital industry, where newer and better alternatives swiftly replace firmly established items. 

Product management can help with it.

When discussing tools for product managers, we frequently speak to the primary handful that most product managers utilize daily. These product management solutions often comprise software for roadmapping, development tracking, and product analytics.

But gathering product insight, monitoring the backlog, and analyzing the product roadmap are only a few of a product manager’s duties. Whether you’re a novice product manager or an experienced PM, you should check to ensure you pay attention to every crucial aspect of your job because you need the right tool.

Product managers must wear multiple hats because the industry is diverse and ever-changing. The role is fast-paced and comprehensive, involving everything from gathering and managing ideas to creating a product strategy, from working on user research to organizing intricate processes and workflows.

The solution you choose and your use case will determine the answer. A product manager can substantially contribute to product innovation when given the right product management tools.

Due to the dynamic and diversified nature of the Field of product management, there is no one-size-fits-all strategy for success.

So, we’ve produced a list to make selecting the best product management solution simpler.

What Is a Product Manager’s Internal Tool?

The daily operations of your internal teams are made simpler and more effective by internal tools and applications. 

These tools are created, developed, and maintained by internal product managers. Product management for internal devices has advanced significantly in recent years. 

Business users may now readily design internal tools based on their requirements, unlike old product management approaches that involved spreadsheets and other manual tasks. It is made possible by the quick expansion of platforms with little or no code.

Internal tool product management is the process of determining a need for, developing, and overseeing internal tools that will satisfy the needs of numerous individuals at your business. In tech startups, it’s one of the scary product roles, but it doesn’t have to be.

Internal tool product management can be fraught with uncertainty, and you frequently have to make snap judgments that influence your company’s expectations for the tools. Additionally, as businesses look to develop custom software for their staff and rely less on off-the-shelf products, the demand for internal tool product management is quickly rising.

Building goods for colleagues is the best method to learn product management because it keeps you one step ahead of the competition.

As a business expands, its needs change continuously. Therefore, companies should keep growing their internal tools to stay current with the shifting business trends. CTOs have two options for handling product management of internal tools: either designate a single person or create a team.

When it comes down to it, internal tools are simply the equipment or software that staff members at a company use daily. 

These are commonly referred to as “admin tools” since they take care of administrative duties and activities, freeing up valuable time for operational staff to work strategically or on behalf of customers.

Different kinds of software are in use as internal tools for internal product management. In their product creation process, businesses can reflect and work together.

An internal product manager creates internally focused apps and updates them to meet changing business user requirements. As part of a more significant digital transformation effort, a corporation may choose to buy or build internal tools.

External tools include product management software, customer relationship management software, usability testing platforms, and issue tracking systems.

These software solutions are crucial for assisting firms in achieving their objectives while being flexible and cost-effective. Developing and using internal technologies has also led to the best new internal product management techniques.

The complexity of these internal tools and processes can multiply dramatically as businesses expand.

Internal tools are specialized programs and applications created in-house at your business for a particular team or use case. Such equipment can:

• Report progress on organizational goals and monitor dashboard output from critical stakeholders.
• Can create a technical solution that aligns with the business’s requirements.
• Examine the solution to ensure that it is functional.
• Help launch the internal teams’ tool.
• Conduct continuous scaling and regular tool testing.

Internal tools are crucial to a company’s success. As a result, each company needs to keep a separate methodology for managing these technologies. The entire organizational harmony could disintegrate anytime without a formal internal mechanism for product management.

An internal product manager should also be thoroughly familiar with these internal tools. Businesses frequently make the error of substituting a team member with insufficient tool knowledge for an internal product manager.

Companies eventually outgrow their systems and tools due to growth in employee, customer, or order intake. The issue cannot be avoided if an internal process, design, or tool actively hinders or fails to scale along with the business growth.

Product management and internal tool management are comparable. Internal product management’s target users, as opposed to external product management’s, are employees rather than customers. Therefore, the internal tools product manager is in charge of handling problem-solving and other internal departmental difficulties.

These product managers frequently have their team of committed designers and engineers and sit halfway between IT and the expanding Product Ops division. Product or business analyst, project manager, or product owner are typical job titles for corresponding positions.

Like product managers in charge of consumer-facing goods, those in charge of internal tools must discover customer problems and provide scalable solutions that are well-liked by users and beneficial to the company’s bottom line. 

Because they don’t work on revenue-generating, customer-facing products, product managers for internal tools may feel marginalized within a firm.

Why Do Product Managers Need Internal Tools?

These solutions integrate with 

• Several services and apps. 
• Reduce data separation for businesses
• Streamline the work of various departments through automation. 

Internal solutions that cross information barriers and facilitate smooth scaling and growth are more critical as companies adopt digital technology and frameworks.

Determining whether or not to develop an internal tool can take time, especially when expenses are considered. The key to choosing whether or not to invest in internal tools is striking the right balance. 

Internal tool development (and maintenance) costs are typically balanced against the productivity gains made possible by those tools.

Internal tools are one of the most frequently forgotten components of any reliable IoT system. Product managers typically need to pay more attention to internal tools in favor of the customer-facing components of the solution. IoT solutions, on the other hand, often necessitate monitoring, controlling, and background work.

However, repetitive and typical duties like managing help desks, monitoring websites, issuing refunds to consumers, and creating KPI dashboards can be simplified using internal technologies.

You can analyze the performance of your website using internal tools, make plans, and in some circumstances, even save money. But because there are so many kinds available, you should take time to pinpoint your demands before making any equipment purchase.

Most businesses use these solutions to increase team efficiency, control logistics and quickly assist clients with technical issues. You can save money in some situations and plan for the future using internal tools.

A convenient list of their preferred internal tools for various administrative duties is something that many managers and administrators have today. If not, there are several methods to learn more about these technologies.

Best Product Management Internal Tools

Below is a list of the most incredible internal tools you could employ, which we have compiled to make your duty easier.

Chisel:

Chisel’s goal is to assist you in creating fantastic items. To develop incredible things, it’s crucial to construct the appropriate product at the right time, align the team, and establish a robust and direct connection with the customer. 

Product Makers have access to various software products on the market to manage their roadmaps. However, they must give your team the best tools for alignment or creating a solid customer relationship. Chisel was established to offer a unified platform to support these three facets of product management.

Features by Chisel include

• Treeview
• Release
• Kanban

And many more.

TreeView:

Your product can be broken down into parts (epics) and features with Treeview (stories) aid. Using driving variables like customer reach, customer value, projected revenue, and anticipated work, a product creator can rank feature requests in order of importance. You can categorize features by goals, releases, and more.

Release:

To maintain your deliverables on schedule, Chisel’s release view groups features into release sprints.

Kanban:

Rapid iteration is essential for agile teams and products. Make Kanban boards to help you identify what needs to be done right away, next, or in the future.

Google Sheets:

Most articles will tell you that spreadsheets are the least helpful, yet the best product managers are quick to work with unprocessed data. Because of this, spreadsheets are at the top of our list. 

Although unsightly, they are effective in processing data and generating insights that help with product decisions. Top product managers will utilize Google Sheets at least once throughout the planning phase.

Spreadsheets do have several things that could be improved. They are useless for stakeholder presentations and make collaboration a pain. 

However, we continue to support Sheets because it doesn’t require any onboarding for a seasoned PM, requires no licensing, is simple to access, and is simple to use for a seasoned product lead.

Information sharing and frictionless collaboration:

Sheets make it simple for teams to collaborate, whether you’re organizing an event or sharing the most recent income statistics. 

You can quickly add collaborators to projects, keep track of changes as they happen, get alerts for changes that take place while you’re away, and collaborate with coworkers in the same document. As you make adjustments, they are all automatically stored.

Get quick insights using Google AI:

Everyone in the organization has access to Sheets, which enables them to gain insightful knowledge from data. Formula acceleration surfaces pertinent formulas as you enter, which reduces errors and saves time. Clicking on the Explore button will show you trends and configurable visuals for an even more straightforward way to navigate your data.

Notion:

Despite its user-friendly features, Notion’s note-taking functions make this task management application popular. The finest product managers use Notion to take notes during meetings, organize and label them, and quickly access pertinent information. 

For PMs who take numerous notes from various stakeholders, including leadership, business development, engineering, and design, 1:1s, team meetings, and, most crucially, user interviews, finding meeting notes is critical.

Collaboration without chaos:

To break down barriers and work together, connect your teams, projects, and documents in Notion.

Create the workflow you desire:

Make the Notion function the way you want it to by customizing it. To create the dashboard, website, document, or system you require, drag and drop.

Pendo:

Pendo is marketed as a platform for product uptake and was created with customer delight in mind. It blends feedback management with analytics to assist product teams in enhancing the general consumer experience.

A tool like Pendo gives you access to information on how your customers interact with your product. In contrast, surveys and user research can provide insight into what your users believe.

Split:

Split was created to enable product teams to “deploy more frequently, release without fear, and experiment to see what your consumers love (or detest).” Split is what is known as a feature flagging tool.

With feature flags, product teams have more flexibility and agility when testing and experimenting with different features, running A/B tests, and removing any new features that don’t perform well. 

Feature flags are used in software development to turn specific product features on or off without deploying new code.

Field:

On the waiting list to try, Field is the top product manager. It might be challenging to comprehend the vast picture because thorough product planning involves numerous concepts, ideas, research findings, a common understanding, hypotheses, and different tools, as you can see from our list. 

As its name suggests, Field is a product management tool that has not yet been made available to the general public but aids product teams in outlining their concepts and plans.

Explore — Verify Coherence, Gain Understanding:

You get a comprehensive picture of every crucial product and portfolio development component with Explore.

Giving Clarity and Setting Direction:

Every product manager can master slide decks with Present. Never before has it been simpler to explain the strategy to various audiences.

Miro:

PMs invest significant time in strategic work, using tables, flowcharts, and mind maps to analyze and determine what to do. They are all often used by both individuals and teams.

If you are used to using a whiteboard for product management, try a virtual one. A fantastic visual collaboration tool is Miro. You must learn how to utilize a whiteboard for group brainstorming before using Miro if you need to learn how. 

The most seasoned product leads to knowing which visual frameworks best handle the issue.

Brainstorming:

With the aid of sticky notes, pictures, mind maps, videos, sketching capabilities, and so on, unleash your creative thoughts and build upon them.

Diagramming:

Use one of our many diagrams, such as flowcharts, swimlanes, or strategic planning, to picture projects and concepts of any size.

Consultations & Workshops:

Sticky notes, voting, live reactions, and icebreakers should all be used to encourage conversation and interaction among attendees, including those who are far away.

Trello:

Trello is one of the more robust project management applications that aim to improve teamwork within and between departments.

Trello allows you to manage numerous projects and arrange various activities by allowing you to build boards, lists, and cards. 

You may also set up 

• Calendars
• Create checklists
• Assign productivity indicators 

to get a clear picture of everything happening. Trello has built-in automation for the best processes and the least manual effort, like many other top products today.

Trello is essential to your product management stack because the product manager’s job involves coordinating various moving elements.

FullStory:

A Digital Experience Intelligence (DXI) platform, FullStory collects and examines quantitative and qualitative data. Product teams use technologies like FullStory to enhance the user’s product experience, improving operational effectiveness, customer retention, and revenue generation.

All of the features of FullStory are powered by data. You can monitor how users engage with your digital product in real time and adjust it as necessary with complete and secure data collection, in-depth product analytics, and sophisticated session replay functionality.

The likes of Peloton, Forbes, and GNC all support FullStory. Additionally, it integrates smoothly with your current product management solutions for a complete data picture thanks to an open API and a growing list of connectors.

Figma:

At the beginning of the epidemic, Figma, like Miro, stormed the product world. Its best-known feature is the simple prototyping tool’s comment function, which enables teams to give comments concurrently on the same version. 

On Figma, web files may be effortlessly shared with just one link. Collaboration is just as simple as using a Google Doc.

Figma’s main selling point is its ability to create and test low- to high-fidelity prototypes before the UX team works on the final product. Because all the design files are in one location, their design system tools eliminate the requirement for version control. 

To fully regulate feedback, editors can lock and release commenting and editing.

Construct the bridge:

Transform developer handoffs into ongoing discussions where design and development speak the same language.

An entirely new level of collaboration is made possible through Figma. Working together allows the team to ship things more quickly.

Deliver superior results:

With a platform that links the dots between design, product, and development, you can produce better products and have an effect.

Pitch:

Any product manager must be able to present well. Project managers frequently need formal power to influence. 

Product managers rarely have direct reports but must steer numerous teams toward varied goals. They must continually persuade stakeholders to support them through clear, visual communication. 

You may communicate your idea more effectively with a decent pitch deck template, but you must first be an excellent storyteller.

Build beautiful decks quickly:

Everything you need to create a fantastic deck is available with Pitch, from sophisticated design features to data integrations.

Make it simple to stay on-brand:

It is simple for decks to stray from the excellent brand look when you’re going quickly. Pitch helps anyone create stunning presentations by putting the most recent fonts, colors, and templates front and center.

Putting It All Together:

What software do you consider best for product creation, and why?

Do you favor using a collection of product development tools over an all-in-one tool?

Numerous low-code and no-code technologies have been developed for anything from remote onboarding to project management. For internal product managers, using the best tool for the work will result in more fruitful results. But being a great internal product manager comes down to knowing the issue at hand and which tool can address it more successfully.

If you’re an internal product manager seeking to incorporate no-code and low-code software into your current internal tools or are simply interested in what process automation can accomplish for your company, read the article above, and you’ll be all set.