The Top 7 Product Management Software Systems You Should Know About


It’s safe to say that shipping a product from start to finish is no easy task for a product manager. In order to get the job done properly and efficiently, product managers deserve the proper software, tools and resources needed to create and execute successful products. Bain Public’s experienced group of product managers reviewed the following 7 product management software systems, helping product managers with a wide variety of tasks such as product strategy and roadmapping, task management, customer feedback, user testing and much more.

1. Aha!: Roadmap and Build Products Customers Love
Aha! Is a highly customizable product, covering all aspects of project and product management as well as offering a system suitable for large product teams. The Aha! system is complex allowing for many tasks to get done with a single software. It provides tools to help with the entire product management process such as managing ideas and releasing features. However, because of its complexity, it may not be suitable for smaller product teams.

Aha! offers the following features:

  • Canvas and models (frameworks, persona, competitors)
  • Documentation system and version control
  • Full suite idea portal and management
  • Roadmapping
  • Features and release management (Gantt chart)
  • Kanban board — scrum management
  • Mockup tools
  • Generate a presentation deck within the system using real-time data
  • Various reports
Integrations: Github, Trello, Salesforce, Zendesk, Slack, Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Analytics etc…

Cost: $59/month for the Premium package

* This price includes all the features needed to set strategy, build roadmaps, plan releases, prioritize features, create mockups, crowdsource ideas and share presentations. Take a look at their website to learn more

2. Craft: The Ultimate Product Platform — Designed by and for Product Managers
Craft is a product management platform for planning and managing products. Their goal is to help product managers better understand their customers, remove friction and ship great products.

Craft offers the following features:

  • Documentation system
  • Image annotation (Note: helps to remove barriers for communicating features on a wireframe)
  • Roadmapping
  • Story mapping
  • Kanban board — scrum management
  • Feedback management (Note: this is an isolated feature that does not link to other features)
  • Clean and simple design
Cost: $39/month for the Essential package

* This price includes several features needed to build a product such as a product roadmap builder, planning and prioritization engine, smart requirements editor, integrations with dev tools (Jira, etc.), CustomerVoice Inbox and integration with Intercom. Take a look at their website to learn more.

3. Glidr: Putting Feedback, Discovery and Validation at the Center — and Product Success Within Reach
The Glidr software allows users to validate ideas with evidence, such as interviews and feedback from customers through the Intercom integration. This concept could encourage product managers to gather data to support initiatives in their roadmap. The software encourages product managers to manage all their ideas in one place and gain a better understanding of how their products should evolve.

Glidr offers the following features:

  • Business canvas
  • Evidence concept for idea curation (Note: this is a qualitative approach. It doesn’t provide the impact score or any quantitative measures to help product managers focus on some features over others. The evidence does not calculate the impact score of a feature).
  • Manage and validate hypotheses and ideas
  • Roadmapping
  • Scrum management (high level)
  • Flexible Kanban tool (Note: product managers use this tool for different purposes such as tracking idea discoveries and workflow validation, roadmapping and scrum management)
  • Add evidence details such as user interviews
Integrations: Intercom, Chrome Extension and Slack

Cost: $10/month for the Team package

* This prices includes access to project workspace, customizable canvas, assumptions and trend scores, research and experiments, evidence, searchable knowledge base, market sizing, activity feed, in-app and email notifications as well as access to integrations such as Slack, Chrome Extension and Intercom. Take a look at their website to learn more

4. ProdPad: Everything you Need to Build Amazing Products
The goal with ProdPad is to lead the way forward with your product roadmap, prioritize the right ideas for your business, understand what your customers really want and build what matters most. At ProdPad, their mission is to turn you into a confident product manager and help you push the best products forward.

ProdPad offers the following features:

  • Canvas and documentation (product and persona)
  • Manage ideas and feedback
  • Business case for ideas
  • View features in an impact-effort matrix (Note: this is a quantitative tool helping product managers focus on the more important product features)
  • Manage product roadmap
Integrations: JIRA, Trello, Github, Slack, Chrome Extension, Dropbox etc…

Cost: $99/month for the Essential package

* This price includes unlimited products and roadmaps, idea management, customer feedback, personas, design collaboration, essential integrations (JIRA, Trello, Slack, GitHub, VSO, Pivotal Tracker, Rally, UserVoice and Zapier) and unlimited reviewers. Take a look at their website to learn more

5. ProductPlan: The Easiest Way to Plan, Visualize and Communicate your Product Strategy
At ProductPlan, they believe in making roadmapping easy, collaborative and transparent. They see roadmaps as the key to creating organizational alignment and shipping successful products.

Product Plan offers the following features:

  • Manage features and parking lot
  • Drag and drop roadmapping
  • Auto-scoring system to prioritize features (weighted average scores and ranking)
Integrations: JIRA, Github, PivotalTracker, Trello, Azure and Slack

Cost: $39/month for the Business plan

* This price includes building unlimited roadmaps, sharing with unlimited free viewers, viewing the portfolio with Master Plans, exporting to PDF, PND and XLS as well as access to Trello and JIRA integrations. Take a look at their website to learn more

6. ProductBoard: Get the Right Products to Market, Faster
Productboard is the product management system that helps you understand what users need, prioritize what to build and rally everyone around your roadmap. They help you build products that will truly matter. Products that will be loved and enjoyed by your customers.

ProductBoard offers the following features:

  • Inbox for gathering and reviewing ideas and feedback
  • Tie feedback to particular features (Note: the system can auto-calculate the impact score)
  • Manage and prioritize features
  • Roadmapping
  • Product portal to gather feedback on upcoming and new features
  • Customer support tools
  • Chrome Extension (Note: this allows people across the organization to submit and contribute ideas and feedback to the inbox, for example, sales could submit a customer request).
Integrations: Trello, JIRA, PivotalTracker, Github, Intercom, Zendesk, Slack, Zapier and Chrome Extension.

Cost: $49/month for the Individual package

* This price includes features such as insights inbox, feature prioritization and planning, roadmaps, portal and integrations such as Intercom, Zendesk, Slack, Trello, Pivotal and Gifthub. Take a look at their website to learn more.

7. Roadmunk: A Roadmap Tool for Visualizing your Strategy and Aligning your Whole Organization
The goal at Roadmunk is to "make strategic roadmapping quick, effective and collaborative across an entire organization." Roadmunk is a very simple product management tool that takes care of roadmapping and planning. It does not, however, help product managers prioritize or evaluate the impact of each feature.

Roadmunk offers the following features:

  • Roadmapping — Gantt chart (Note: one roadmap for multiple teams in the organization)
  • Kanban — scrum management
  • Integration to JIRA
Cost: $19/month for the Starter package

* This price includes unlimited roadmaps, views and filters, import/export from CSV, milestones, publish to URL and activity feed. Take a look at their website to learn more.

Thanks to Charles Mon for researching this article, Paul Ortchanian for reading drafts and overseeing aspects of its publication. Also, if you have any feedback or criticism about this article then shoot us an email info@bainpublic.com.
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About Bain Public

Bain Public, acquired by X Machina-AI Inc. in January 2022, offers consistent roadmap planning processes & tools for business leaders and product managers organized around what motivates, inspires and improves growth. Bain Public offers a variety of articles, e-books and approaches designed to help organizations understand their digital strategies, introduce elements of roadmapping and establish product-led change amongst the senior leaders and managers. Our approach, product, expert advice and coaching helps entangle complex technology, people and roadmap dynamics.

About XMachina

X Machina-AI seeks to provide a platform for the acquisition of Artificial Intelligence ("AI") entities in North America. The company’s thesis is based on an aggregation strategy to acquire successful AI targets and make them better through the addition of growth capital, streamlining of corporate processes and human capital acquisitions. The current sector focus of the Company is on enhancing supply-chain efficiencies, logistics and manufacturing.