2023 was a wild year for everybody, but I think in Tech specifically, it was earth shattering. AI monopolized every discussion, layoffs were out of control (again!), and AirBnB dropped product managers.
With change, a series of skills and abilities get replaced by newer and more effective ones. The same can be said about tools. Are product managers in 2024 using the same software, websites, and programs to manage their needs? Are all time favorites such as Miro, Notion or Trello still relevant? Or do we have some interesting newcomers that might help you better navigate these times of uncertainty?
Let’s cover some of the tools that continue to perform reliably and bring in some others that might improve your chances of succeeding in the world of product management.
To evaluate the best product management software available out there, we need a common ground to compare them. Software A might be great for some very niche applications, but it’s not easily scalable to the overall product population. Similarly, a software might be very user dependent, meaning that it’s as good as your ability to extract value from it.
You want your users to be happy, satisfied, and for them to continue to use said products. With that in mind, your tools should enable you to better advocate for your users.
When championing the user, a product manager needs to do three things: to know and understand that user, to expose their needs and expectations, and to prioritize addressing those needs and expectations.
All the tools I picked to cover today are evaluated across these three axes. To simplify this, the capabilities are judged according to:
Without further ado, let’s get to the list!
| User understanding | ⚫⚫⚫⚫⚫ |
| Effective communication | ⚫⚫⚪⚪⚪ |
| Efficient prioritization | ⚫⚫⚫⚫⚫ |
Before you scoff at the bias of my first place selection, remember that despite its ownership of the blog, we’ve set up impartial and reasonable criteria. LogRocket would be the head of this list regardless of where this article was published.
LogRocket is a platform dedicated to providing logs, session replays, and page intelligence for developers, designers, and product managers. With the help of LogRocket, it’s possible to identify conversion chokeholds, user journey issues, live bugs and user behavioral trends.
It provides the equivalent of Amplitude, Hotjar and New Relic together into the same bundle. Not only that, but it also manages to do more than the three previously mentioned together, thanks to powerful AI insights provided by its AI solution, Galileo. Galileo is capable of identifying and analyzing problematic patterns at scale, things you wouldn’t probably notice on your own.
| User understanding | ⚫⚫⚫⚫⚪ |
| Effective communication | ⚫⚫⚫⚫⚫ |
| Efficient prioritization | ⚫⚫⚫⚪⚪ |
Miro has been an all time favorite of product managers and designers for quite a long time, and there’s no reason why it would lose its prestigious position in 2024. Miro boasts an impressive free tier access to its platform and a plethora of free templates that cover anything from mind maps to process flow diagrams, as well as canvases, opportunity trees and wireframes.
Miro is essentially a collaborative white board which you can use to make abstract thoughts and discussions into tangible pieces of knowledge that can either facilitate communication or serve as documental reference in the future.
As a matter of fact, Miro is not just great for communicating with others, but it’s also powerful as a notebook where you can plot all your ideas and work with them in a visual way.
| User understanding | ⚫⚫⚪⚪⚪ |
| Effective communication | ⚫⚫⚫⚫⚫ |
| Efficient prioritization | ⚫⚫⚫⚫⚫ |
tl;dv is a god send for product managers because it essentially eliminates all the mental bandwidth necessary to stay on top of so many meetings. It records all the video sessions from your calendar, be it Teams, Meet or Zoom, and takes notes on your behalf. The notes are then condensed by an AI that extracts and synthesizes core subjects discussed for easy reference later on, including the bits of the video that refer to said subject.
| User understanding | ⚫⚫⚫⚪⚪ |
| Effective communication | ⚫⚫⚫⚪⚪ |
| Efficient prioritization | ⚫⚫⚫⚪⚪ |
This list could be targeted at vastly different audiences, but Chat GPT would make an appearance at some point regardless. The most powerful generative AI available right now took the world by storm in 2023 and it seems that there isn’t anything that the software can’t do.
Acting almost as a second brain, ChatGPT and the Open.AI API can perform a lot of the “busy work” involved with product management: writing development requests, crafting polite emails to impolite stakeholders, translating complex documents, writing SQL queries, and analyzing huge spreadsheets.
Chat GPT won’t do the job for you, but like tl;dv for meetings, it has the capability of scaling your time in ways that were impossible before, guaranteeing you have room to properly study and understand your users.
| User understanding | ⚫⚫⚫⚫⚪ |
| Effective communication | ⚫⚫⚫⚫⚪ |
| Efficient prioritization | ⚫⚪⚪⚪⚪ |
Closing our top five and beautifully complementing LogRocket’s suit of services, Zeda.io enables the other half of you “user understanding” super power as a product manager: voice of customer.
Zeda.io is the go to tool for marketeers, customer success specialists, and product managers to centralize and analyze subjective feedback captured from several different client touch points. It can integrate with forms, databases, case management platforms and analytics tools to come up with a comprehensive picture of what your clients think about you.
| User understanding | ⚫⚪⚪⚪⚪ |
| Effective communication | ⚫⚫⚫⚫⚫ |
| Efficient prioritization | ⚫⚫⚪⚪⚪ |
The silliest but maybe most effective way of presenting Notion is calling it “the Miro of text.” Notion has also been around for quite some time now and it has left behind its humble beginning as a note taking app.
Notion can act as a wiki for your product, as a tracking document for projects, as a simple note taker or as basically anything else you need in order to write something down and access it later. The introduction of generative AI to the product last year means that Notion now has a Chat GPT of sorts integrated natively, which massively expands its capabilities as a knowledge sharing tool.
A well formatted Notion library can directly translate into less emails and instant messages. Notion won’t do any groundbreaking changes to your discovery or prioritization process, but it sure will make communicating it better while saving you precious time.
| User understanding | ⚫⚫⚫⚪⚪ |
| Effective communication | ⚫⚫⚪⚪⚪ |
| Efficient prioritization | ⚫⚫⚫⚫⚪ |
As we move away from the top 5, I took the liberty of adding some software that offers important indirect gains. They are not intrinsically targeted at product managers, but the edge they provide to product teams as a whole mean they are must haves at your product stack. This is the case of Builder.io.
Builder.io is a tool powered by generative AI that can transform figma designs into code. Not only that, it can also output responsive screens, follow company code frameworks, and comes with a chatbot assistant that can edit and change code in a conversational way.
Although it presents no direct benefit for product managers, the speed and scale it provides to A/B testing development, end-user design critique, and MVP crafting guarantees its spot here. Builder.io can make it easier to understand your users, reduce the amount of overlapping communication threads inside the team, and make it quicker to validate or discard prioritized tests.
| User understanding | ⚫⚫⚪⚪⚪ |
| Effective communication | ⚫⚪⚪⚪⚪ |
| Efficient prioritization | ⚫⚫⚫⚪⚪ |
Like Builder.io, Zapier is another software that isn’t directly intended for product managers, but the operational gains it provides by being able to connect any software with another without the need to code, vastly improves your ability to test and launch MVPs.
If you have ever led a product from inception to first release, you know how many corners you have to cut in order to keep it standing. Before reaching scalability and reliability, a new product often depends on a lot of manual processes, and Zapier is here to save the overburdened product manager.
Although it shines brightest in an operational context, Zapier enables product teams to put their work out faster, which means that you can collect feedback from users quicker and spend less time making sure all the personnel involved on precarious launch workflows are doing their part.
| User understanding | ⚫⚫⚫⚪⚪ |
| Effective communication | ⚫⚪⚪⚪⚪ |
| Efficient prioritization | ⚫⚫⚪⚪⚪ |
G2 is more of a service than a software, but I took some creative liberties to make sure it got its spot. If you’re a product manager looking for a software to help you deliver on any challenge, you’ll find a solution here with comprehensive analysis, feature comparisons, and plenty of user feedback.
G2 won’t necessarily provide you with direct insight on users, but keeping an eye on the competition is an important proxy for understanding your clients, and it sometimes shows user patterns you would be unaware of otherwise. The competition has a role on your prioritization, but it’s important not to obsess about it.
| User understanding | ⚪⚪⚪⚪⚪ |
| Effective communication | ⚫⚫⚪⚪⚪ |
| Efficient prioritization | ⚫⚫⚫⚪⚪ |
I was resistant at first to add any project management tool on this list such as Jira or ClickUp. With that said, I couldn’t leave at least one project management tool out of our list, so I thought to myself — What is the least bloated, most straightforward and reliable project management tool I could recommend to all product managers?
Trello benefits from its simplicity and objectiveness. Bigger project platforms try and incapsulate so many possible workflows and processes that using them more often than not becomes a toil. Trello, on the other hand, is the most straightforward way of moving cards on a kanban board. Couple that with its generous free tier and you have yourself an indispensable prioritization partner.
We are not going to keep this article up-to-date, which means that it’s more of a snapshot of this moment rather than “the ultimate list” of product management software. Regardless, we can try and project how the marketplace will change as 2024 progresses.
Maybe Chat GPT 5 is released and this entire list becomes redundant, maybe world tensions get so high that the globe comes to a halt like it did during the first year of the pandemic, or maybe 2024 is finally the year where we make contact and all software will be provided by aliens.
All jokes aside, if there is one thing that the 2020s showed us it’s that predicting the future is a futile exercise. Take every advantage you can to improve your product management game, so that you’re shielded as best as possible against the unpredictable.
Featured image source: IconScout
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