A good PM uses good tools
What I love about our industry is the fact our ways of working change almost on a weekly basis; this could be due to industry, management, or experimentation. But to enable the benefits of any ways of working, communication and prioritisation are key. Here are 5 tools that I use to make this as easy and simple as possible:
You will notice in this post there is no mention of ticketing tools, that’s because there will be a post dedicated to that subject coming soon!
Trello
Where would I be without Trello?!? For the uninitiated, Trello is an online collaboration tool that organises your projects into boards in one place. Trello tells you what’s being worked on, who is working on what, and where something is in a process. I started using Trello about a year ago because when I gave access to my ticketing kanban boards to stakeholders who don’t use these tools on a regular basis, I was usually met with “I have no idea what I am looking at”.
Trello works for me because I am a very visual person, and images with colored labels register with my brain much better than plain text. Making decisions on what should be done over other tasks is much easier to visualise when it’s in one place and I struggle to find a tool that is as simple but as effective as Trello.
Slack
If I could pick one problem that 99.9% of all teams have, it would probably be “We send far too many emails”. Slack isn’t the silver bullet for this problem but it has helped me better than any other messaging tool. Slack is a team collaborating tool originally created by a team in the games industry to help collaborate better on a game they were developing. Although the actual game the project team created wasn’t successful, the tool for communicating throughout that project is changing the face of online digital teams around the world. Every team I have piloted this tool with adapted very quickly, emails reduced and we started to have more meaningful conversations (yes you can have a meaningful conversation with someone even with giphy’s!). This tool integrates with pretty much anything you can think of from Google drive to “if this do that” and everything in between. In fact I love Slack so much I will be writing an experts guide soon so watch this space.
MarvelApp
For the UX designers in us all! Marvel app is a prototyping tool for visualizing apps. From a collection of static images you can have a visual representation of your app within seconds (well once you know what you are doing). I stumbled upon this tool during an app hackathon. This tool helped me formulate our half baked ideas into well thought out user journey’s that could be tested and validated through iteration at lighting pace. What I love about this tool is you can integrate with dropbox to get all your assets, set your call to actions and run the page as a web browser from a mobile desktop screen. This means I can iterate a user journey with my stakeholders very quickly and efficiently.
Snagit
Lets face it, we do a lot of bug spotting, whether it’s from that first round of QA before actual testing or validating a bug that has been brought to your attention. Sometimes it’s hard to capture these issues especially when using teams on the other side of the planet. Snagit lets you capture video, audio, and screen grabs in a quick and easy interface. You can curate and annotate your captured medium in double-quick pace all in one place.
What makes it even better is it’s FREE. I tend to use this tool for video capturing. This has been fundamental for me when I am working with teams who aren’t sharing the same geographical location as me and only have a 1 demential documentation to work from.
Responsive web tool: Chrome extension
This tool recommendation is very specific for products that are browser based. This chrome extension has helped me no ends. It allows me to simulate any device on my laptop browser so I can see the exact experience a user is getting. I have also installed this tool on every laptop of anyone who works with me so they can be more empathetic to the users needs. Many originations say they are “mobile first” but actually never look at their product on a mobile device, tools like this extension is a small step in the right direction.
Do YOU agree with Adam’s top 5 tools for product management? What would you have? Leave a comment below:
