Here is my list of 5 tools that I use regularly at my job as a product manager.
1. Confluence
Confluence is my go to tool for any writing work. In a PM world 95% of the work is writing work, remaining 5% is talking about the writing. Writing helps me talk to myself, helps me detect fallacies in my theories and hypothesis, helps others read my thoughts in their own time, at their own pace and lets them ask questions that make me think deeper.
Use cases: Vision-strategy-initiatives page, OKRs, Project posters, meeting notes, specs, requirements, bug bash... almost every stage of product building.
2. Loom
If Confluence is for writing, then Loom is for show & tell. Looms helps me make quick demos of things that we are working on. It also helps me explain a long Confluence page - I go through the page, that I think needs help understanding, on the video and walk them through it. Loom is also great to send out quick 3-min update on the status of a project or KPIs of a recently shipped feature, to the leadership.
Use cases: Product demos, weekly or monthly status updates, sharing learning from a project to a larger team.
3. Miro
Miro is great to explain abstract mental models to the team. I use it to convey a user flow or even 3-year strategy with initiatives. The moment something is structured and visual, people just get it so much easier than explaining it with words. If you've ever had the feeling 'I wish there was a whiteboard to draw this flow chart', then this is the tool.
It's a tool I fall back on when I'm struggling to explain something, there are things that make a lot of sense in the head but hard to put across without a whiteboard. A lot of the boards are for my personal consumption, just to spar with myself.
Use cases: Explain strategy and OKR in a diagrammatic manner, rollout plans, division of work in a team & sub-teams.
4. Balsamiq
Love Balsamiq for its wire-framing capabilities. I use it to sketchup a very rough idea to spar with the triad. These sketches are not shared with the engineering team because sometime the team takes this as a source of truth and when the designer finally does the design, they have an uphill battle to fight with the engineering for 'change of scope'. So I try to keep the wireframes within the triad of PM, design and engineering manager, while we explore the solutions space.
Use cases: Wire-framing the possible solutions, annotate on screenshots and share with the team.
5. Amplitude
What's a PM to do without data?! Amplitude is pretty easy to use, at least the way it is setup in my organization. It is my go to place to understand product usage by customer cohorts over a period of time.
Use cases: Understand user behaviour in the product, track KPIs.
This post was inspired by this tweet: