Sachin Rekhi

I thought I’d share my top ten favorite tools for helping me accomplish my day-to-day responsibilities as a product manager. These tools fall into three categories: collaboration, user feedback, and analytics.

Collaboration
Many of the responsibilities of a product manager involve collaborating, communicating, and coordinating efforts across a team of engineers, designers, product managers, and more. These are the tools I use to most effectively collaborate with the entire team.

Asana
Asana is an easy-to-use yet powerful project management tool that lets you track all tasks across the entire team, whether it’s feature suggestions, engineering tasks, bugs, and more. It’s lighter weight compared to more traditional tools like JIRA, Basecamp, and others. But still supports the collaboration needs of assigning and organizing tasks compared to more simple to do list apps.

Notejoy
I use Notejoy for all my docs and notes, including product roadmaps, specs, product/market fit hypotheses, designs, as well as capturing and sharing screenshots of industry apps, interesting web designs, press mentions, customer interviews, and more.

G Suite
I primarily use G Suite when I need to create and share spreadsheets and presentations.

Dropbox
For the PDFs and Microsoft Office documents that I still can’t get by without in certain scenarios, I love Dropbox for sharing traditional files with the rest of the team.

Cloudapp
I find myself constantly sharing screenshots of our product to point out bugs and Cloudapp is the simplest way to take a screenshot and have it instantly uploaded with a shareable url.

User Feedback
Equally critical to the product role is having a strong understanding of what user’s love, hate, and want to see in your product. I use the following tools to capture such feedback.

UserVoice
UserVoice is my tool of choice for adding a Feedback tab on every page of your site. It then makes it extremely easy for users to send in feedback, vote up existing feedback, and more.

SnapEngage
SnapEngage makes it easy to add a chat window to your app so your users at any time can chat with you to get help with issues, provide feedback, and more. It’s a great way to start a conversation with a user when they are looking for technical support. No better way to understand your users than chatting with them directly.

Wufoo
Wufoo is a great survey tool for asking your users about their experience using your application. I’ve typically automatically sent out such a survey to all users 14 days after signing up to get a constant stream of feedback on user’s initial experience with your product.

Twitter
Twitter has become a common place for users to express their excitement or frustration for whatever new products they are trying. I have a saved keyword search for our product that I check daily to hear what’s resonating most with members, what frustrates them, as well as what new features they’d like us to add to the product.

Analytics
In addition to a qualitative understanding of user feedback, it’s critical to understand usage patterns of users by diving into product analytics.

Google Analytics
Google Analytics is my primary analytics tool of choice. It’s the first thing I set up on every site I’ve built. It provides an API to do even more detailed analysis than the product offers itself. I typically have augmented Google Analytics with home grown tools, but typically have those tools still integrate with Google Analytics.