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Product Management Software Buyer's Guide
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Product Management Software is software that encompasses the organizational life cycle function of a product. The organizational life cycle deals with the planning, forecasting, production, and marketing of the product. A Product Management System deals with the product roadmap and monitors the value chain of a product throughout its life cycle.
» What is Product Management Software?
Product management software is an organizational tool used to monitor the development and improve products quickly and efficiently. These software enable product managers and their respective teams to accumulate new ideas and layout specific designs and plans to convert the ideas into a finished product. They also provide the user with increased transparency and insight into product development for other departments like finance, marketing and sales as well.
Product management solutions provide the user with a number of features that help him or her in organizing and implementing product plans. Roadmap features break down the workflow of a product from the formation of an idea to product launch. Continuously tracking and analyzing the team’s progress and enabling features for adjustments to timelines are also features present in product management software. These software also provide tools for resource allocation, product portfolio management, and streamlined workflows, like user testing, sprint planning, and bug tracking.
» What are the features of Product Management Software?
Product management systems vary significantly in size and function. Some software has specializations in only one phase of the product life cycle while others offer an integrated suite of tools to assess multiple phases. Some of the best Product management tools are as follows:
› Collaboration
Increased transparency in product strategy and vision is one of the key features of Product management software. Enabling users to communicate and collaborate in a centralized workspace helps proper strategizing. This helps with the sharing of ideas and the accomplishment of goals.
› Idea and Content Management
Ability to create a forum where users can submit and discuss product ideas and build a business case. This helps in designing a product based on impact vs effort. Uploading and storing files and sharing them with approved users is also an important feature.
› Product Research, Roadmapping and Portfolio Management
Product Management Software helps with conducting research on users, building personas and testing various designs. Breaking of product requirements and putting them on the roadmap to properly construct a product based on customer analysis and feedback is a crucial feature.
Product Management Tools helps with building a product portfolio based on the business strategy and current, short term and future goals. This also helps with communicating the vision, value proposition, go-to-market plans, etc for a product.
› Application Management
This helps with developing and providing software support and application products over the life cycles. This not only helps with easy access but also makes it possible to make revisions to the roadmap from remote locations.
› Reporting and Analytics
Product Management System helps with organizing and analyzing data, spotting trends and identifying trends. It also helps with the collation of data from various sources and building custom reports.
» What are the Benefits of Product Management Software?
Product Management Software helps product managers in carrying out their tasks seamlessly and effectively. In general, all of the processes that a product demands in its entire life cycle, are tedious and time-consuming. The best Product Management Software does this in a more streamlined and efficient manner. Some of the benefits of product management tools are listed below:
› Better Collaboration
The Product Management Software facilitates collaboration between the employees and the managers in a very easy and effective manner. There is a centralized system where they can post their ideas and connect via group chats.
› Faster Delivery
The product roadmap tool ensures better delivery of product meetings. Using the product roadmap tool, the process can be made more flexible so that it becomes easier to decide which ideas should be kept and which should be dropped. The ideas that are dropped are still present in the system but are kept hidden. This helps in prioritizing the ideas that are more central to the development of the product. Hence, the user can present a systematic and uncluttered view of the roadmap ensuring easy and complete use of all the available data.
› Storage & Maintenance
Product Management System aims towards efficient sharing. The product data can be stored at a central location and can be given view-only access to trusted members. The viewers of the roadmap can also be monitored.
› Better Coordination
Product Management Software helps in coordinating strategic efforts across various products. Product portfolio can be used to define the vision, scope and success criteria of the particular product.
› Healthy Relations at workplace
Product Management Software also helps with maintaining cordial relations with the customers. Trusted customers can monitor and provide feedback on the state of a product at a particular stage of the life cycle. This helps the organization that builds a particular product in reviewing the feedback and making changes if need be.
» What is the Cost of Product Management Software?
Apart from sharing the basic features, each product management software holds one or more special features. The cost of the software depends on these features and the size of the organization as well.
The cost of a product management system ranges from $29 per month to $289 per month on an average basis.
Free registration is available across almost all of the platforms. Once registration is done, the user can go ahead and select the plan that perfectly fits his or her business. However, the platforms offer various pricings based on the number of users that are going to access or are registered to the particular platform.
» Conclusion
The organizations that partake in the production business, irrespective of their size, ought to have product management solutions in order to successfully establish and launch their products. This is what product management software caters to helping product managers to ensure that their ideas and teams are on the same page and the resources are being utilized to the maximum potential at all times.