Face recognition SDK is critical in a variety of initiatives, from improving security to transforming customer experiences. This breakthrough technology has quickly made its way into a wide range of applications, offering increased efficiency, convenience, and security across industries. The face recognition SDK (software development kit) is at the heart of this transformation, allowing developers to easily integrate the power of facial recognition into their apps.

Read full article here.
https://faceplugin.com/face-recognition-sdk-by-faceplugin/

The post Empower your Projects with Face Recognition SDK: 9 Must-Have Features for Developers appeared first on ProdSens.live.

Olá devs! Este artigo é resultado de um dos bate-papos que fizemos lá na nossa comunidade no Discord, onde conversamos sobre algumas ferramentas que são “uma mão na roda” para uma pessoa dev no processo de desenvolvimento de algum projeto.

Aqui vamos listar várias ferramentas que os devs da comunidade usam no dia a dia ou já utilizaram por um tempo. Nesta lista existem tanto ferramentas para dev front-end quanto para dev back-end ou dev de qualquer outra área que considere algumas dessas ferramentas úteis.

Índice

• Desktop
• Terminal
• Extensões do Chrome
• REST Clients
• Extensões do VSCode

Desktop

Aqui vão alguns softwares Desktop que incluem diversas ferramentas internamente as quais você geralmente precisa utilizar no dia a dia como dev.

DevToys

O DevToys contém ferramentas como geração de QRCode, geração de UUIDs, formatação para base64, transformação de JSON para Yaml, etc.

Raycast (usuários MacOS)

O Raycast é como o Sotlight do Mac, mas que permite instalar vários plugins diferentes que incluem ferramentas como chat com o ChatGPT da OpenAI, geração de UUIDs, transformações de strings, color picker, dentre várias outras. Você pode encontrar os plugins disponíveis na loja deles.

Terminal

Algumas ferramentas que customizam o seu terminal para ficar mais agradável e trazer mais algumas funcionalidades como, por exemplo, integração com Git sendo possível visualizar a branch a qual você está trabalhando.

Oh My Zsh

Muito utilizado por usuários Linux ou MacOS. Se você for utilizar no Windows, você vai precisar utilizar o WSL ou se você quer utilizar o PowerShell, você pode utilizar a próxima opção.

Oh My Posh

Pode ser utilizado tanto por usuários Linux, MacOS ou PowerShell no Windows.

Extensões do Chrome

Color picker

Uma extensão que permite você capturar cores de componentes do site que está acessando. Muito utilizado por devs front-end. Este é só um exemplo, existem vários outros semelhantes dentro da loja do Chrome, escolha o que mais você se adequa.

JSON Viewer

Sabe quando você vai rodar uma rota GET da sua API no navegador e ela retorna um JSON todo misturado e sem condições de leitura? O JSON Viewer resolve esse problema para você indentando o JSON retornado na página.

React Developer Tools

Adiciona algumas ferramentas de debugs no “inspect” do navegador que facilita quando você for inspecionar componentes do react pelo navegador.

Web Apps by 123apps

Uma extensão que você pode não precisar no seu projeto como dev, mas pode precisar no seu dia a dia. Esta extensão e também o side do 123Apps apresenta ferramentas de edição de vídeo, edição de áudio, formatação de PDF (transformar imagens em PDF, dividir PDF, mesclar PDF, PDF to Word, etc), e mais alguns outros utilitários.

REST Clients

Quando você está construindo APIs, você provavelmente vai precisar de um cliente REST para executar suas rotas não é mesmo? Aqui vão alguns muito utilizados pela comunidade.

Postman

Um dos mais utilizados. Nele além de você gerenciar suas rotas, você consegue criar workspaces, compartilhar com outras pessoas e criar uma documentação dentro da própria ferramenta.

Insomnia

O Insomnia é um pouco mais simples do que o Postman, mas também permite criar workspaces, criar times, etc.

Hoppscotch

O Hoppscotch é bem prático pois ao acessar o site, você já pode passar a utilizar a ferramenta sem precisar realizar login ou instalar a ferramenta como no Postman e Insomnia.

Bruno

Bem semelhante ao Insomnia, mas traz algumas diferenças como armazenar as suas collections das rotas diretamente numa pasta do seu sistema de arquivos, utiliza o Git para versionamento, e algumas outras funcionalidades.

REST Client (VSCode extension)

Esse é na verdade uma extensão do VSCode que permite você pode criar seu cliente REST apenas criando um arquivo na pasta do seu projeto que vai conter todas as chamadas das suas rotas utilizando uma formatação específica da ferramenta.

Extensões do VSCode

Better Comments

Permite você inserir comentários destacados com cores específicas, assim, você pode destacar, por exemplo, algum ponto no código que você precisa voltar em algum momento e revisar.

IntelliCode

O Intellicode utiliza IA para te ajudar com alguns insights de código enquanto você está codando.

IntelliCode API Usage Examples

Inclui exemplos de código dentro das documentações de funções no VSCode de alguma lib que você está utilizando.

Path Intellisense

Te ajuda a encontrar os arquivos que você está importando dentro do código quando você está fazendo aquele famoso "../../......." para encontrar o arquivo.

ESLint

O ESLint é utilizado para ajudar na formatação automática do seu código JavaScript. Você pode customizar como quiser a formatação que você quer fazer no seu código, com ou sem ;, com aspas simples ' ou aspas duplas ", etc.

Prettier – Code Formatter

Funciona como o ESLint, mas pode ser utilizado para várias outras linguagens como JavaScript, TypeScript, JSON, CSS, HTML, Vue, Angular, etc.

Markdown All in One

Te ajuda na formatação de arquivos .md, como, por exemplo, os arquivos README.md que você cria para colocar no GitHub.

Markdown Preview Github Styling

Permite você visualizar seu arquivo .md dentro do VSCode na forma como vai aparecer no GitHub. É bem útil para você verificar se você não errou em alguma formatação no Markdown ou quer melhorar alguma informação antes de subir para o GitHub, por exemplo.

Polacode

Sabe quando você quer tirar uma foto do seu código para postar em algum lugar? O polacode te ajuda a fazer isso de forma rápida, sem precisar sair do VSCode ou lembrar o comando para dar screenshot. Você só seleciona o código que deve ser fotografado e manda o Polacode tirar a foto, que inclusive já sai formatada do jeito que você quer.

Rainbow CSV

Formata os arquivos CSV que você abrir no VSCode.

Regex Previewer

Permite você testar o regex que você criou. Ele abre uma tela de preview onde você pode ir escrevendo palavras diferentes a fim de testar seu regex selecionado.

DotENV (for .env environment variables)

Algumas linguagens utilizam o arquivo .env para guardar variáveis de ambiente. Esta extensão do VSCode te ajuda na formatação desses arquivos.

Front-End

Algumas extensões para a galera front-end.

Auto Rename Tag

Quando você troca o nome de uma tag HTML, essa extensão já altera automaticamente o nome na tag de abertura e na tag de fechamento.

Auto Close Tag

Quando você abre uma tag HTML, essa extensão já cria também uma tag de fechamento automaticamente para você não esquecer.

Color Picker

Mostra um ícone para abrir um color picker em cada cor hexadecimal que você inserir no seu HTML ou CSS. Assim, você pode abrir o color picker, selecionar a cor que você quer e ele vai alterar automaticamente o hexadecimal da cor selecionada.

Customização de ícones de arquivos

Algumas extensões que formatam os ícones das pastas e arquivos do seu projeto dentro do VSCode.

Nos dois exemplos abaixo você consegue personalizar os ícones da forma que você quiser utilizando sua configuração de usuário do VSCode, basta olhar a documentação da ferramenta para verificar como fazer isso.

Symbols

Material Icon Theme

Spell Checker

O Spell Checker te corrige quando você digita qualquer palavra de forma errada. Quando você digita uma palavra errada, a extensão passa um traço azul abaixo da palavra e você também pode pedir dicas de correções. Isso é bem útil para quando vamos nomear variáveis ou funções, com essa ferramenta podemos sempre ficar atentos(as) para escrever a palavra da forma correta e evitar erros mais tarde.

Code Spell Checker

Corrige palavras escritas em inglês.

Brazilian Portuguese – Code Spell Checker

Corrige palavras escritas em Português Brasileiro. Existem Spell Checkers para várias outras linguagens, caso precise para alguma outra, é só pesquisar nas extensões do VSCode que você acha.

Bom, essas foram algumas ferramentas que listamos na comunidade do Discord. E você tem alguma que você utiliza muito e não está listada aqui? Então comenta aqui e compartilha com a gente!

The post Ferramentas que não podem faltar no setup de um(a) dev appeared first on ProdSens.live.

You’ve just launched a new product and are super confident that users will love it. But a few weeks go by, and you notice it didn’t generate the buzz you expected. This is often what a product manager’s nightmares are all about!

Every product requires huge capital and resource investments, so its failure is a major setback—both in terms of finances and reputation.  

Thankfully, you can easily avoid such losses by taking advantage of product analytics, analyzing user engagement, and identifying areas of improvement before it’s too late. Then, all you have to do is give the features or marketing strategies a makeover and reintroduce the product to dazzle your users and increase customer satisfaction.

In this article, we’ll reveal how to leverage product analytics to shape your customer success plans and initial marketing efforts. As a bonus, we’ll also introduce you to a top-notch product analytics solution that helps you monitor and analyze user interactions, identify trends, and improve your product strategy confidently.

What Is Product Analytics?

Product analytics is the process of examining how many users engage with your product or service and how often—the idea is to understand and monitor user behavior to generate actionable insights, which are then used to improve user experience and, by extension, product performance.

For example, imagine you’ve launched a media streaming platform. You’ll use product analytics to shed light on the most and least popular features, identify the titles generating heavy traction, and pinpoint features and titles your platform may be lacking. Based on these insights drawn from behavioral data, you’ll optimize your platform to offer a better customer experience.

Don’t confuse product analytics with data analytics, though.

Product analytics is super specific and focuses only on analyzing data related to a particular product or service to optimize its performance and ensure it aligns with customer needs.

Data analytics is a broader concept rooted in data science that goes beyond product usage. A data analyst deals with different datasets—can be from any source—and uncovers patterns and draws conclusions that support informed decision-making.

Importance of Product Analytics

Product managers can confirm—some people get lucky and deliver a quality product that just clicks despite all odds.

However, you don’t want to rely on a stroke of luck or a hunch, not when you can use product analytics to get quantitative data on your product’s user engagement and market performance.

This approach to analytics is superior because it lets you evaluate your product from your users’ perspective and fix whatever needs to be fixed without overcomplicated procedures like the market funnel analysis or interpretation of raw product data.

Let’s go over five tangible benefits of product analytics:

1. Identification of trends

Product analytics examines the current user engagement and product usage to identify trends, which you can leverage to adjust your marketing efforts and maximize product acceptance.

This is especially essential for industries like agile software development and products under the Internet of Things (IoT) umbrella, where responding to customer needs promptly makes a huge difference in terms of product popularity.

2. Spotting high-value customers easily

The best product analytics tools provide insight into the most valuable customers who spend more than average customers. You can use this usage data to figure out how to retain those customers and increase customer lifetime value, i.e., the total profit you can expect from a customer over their entire user journey.

3. Improved customer experience

By examining user behavior with a product analytics solution or by tracking a particular feature’s user engagement, you can create personalized experiences and win customer loyalty.

4. Better competitive edge

Understanding what your customers want helps you beat your competition and stand out as the market leader.

Tip: Use the ClickUp Competitor Tracking Template to keep tabs on the products, features, and marketing efforts of your top competitors, and use the data to shape your positioning strategy.

5. Precise decision-making

Product analytics tools help you keep an eye on key metrics that set the ground for smarter decisions for short-term profitability and long-term market penetration goals.

Performance Indicators and Metrics to Track in Product Analytics

There are a bunch of product analytics metrics that product managers can track, but that doesn’t mean they should.

First off, analyzing everything isn’t the most economical option as making sense of trends and discoveries across multiple measurement tools would take ages. That’s why the best strategy is to observe a few key product analytics KPIs that:

• Align with your short-term and long-term goals
• Bring the most value to your business

Not sure where to start? Check out the common categories of product analytics performance indicators and metrics:

1. Engagement metrics

Reveals how your customers got to your product (i.e., through which channel), how they’re using it, what features they like the best or the least, and if there’s an X factor that keeps them hooked to your product.

These insights into the user journey help you optimize your product and marketing channels to keep new and existing customers engaged.

2. User retention rates

Returning, loyal customers are a huge win for your company and a clear sign that you’re doing something right. With customer retention analysis, you can measure how many users return to your business and how often. Based on the results, you can pinpoint inefficiencies and develop strategies for improved user retention across touchpoints.

Must-try template: One of the tried-and-tested ways to retain customers is to listen to their issues and provide quality customer service. That’s precisely why you should use the free ClickUp Customer Service Escalation Template to identify urgent customer issues, identify escalation flows, and maintain consistent customer service across channels.

3. Customer churn rates

Churn analysis tells you how many customers have stopped purchasing your physical or digital products or subscription services within a specific time frame, either monthly, annual, or quarterly. This product analytics KPI sheds light on potential disengagement or dissatisfaction points and helps you implement strategies to prevent the loss of customers.

4. Lifetime value of customers

Indicates how much money your customers are expected to spend on your products over time. This is one of the key metrics to track as it pinpoints high-value customers that directly boost your revenue.

Need a quick map to visualize the lifetime touchpoints of different customer profiles? The ClickUp Customer Journey Map Template can help you design products and services aligned with your customers’ needs at various touchpoints.

5. Monthly active users and sales

This set of metrics shows how many people have used your product or service in the past month. Tracking monthly fluctuations can help you spot patterns and adjust your product strategy accordingly.

Try the ClickUp Sales Monthly Report Template for tracking user actions and product performance closely. This template has built-in metrics for tracking revenue and profit and loss, which makes it easier to stay on top of current market trends.

How to Collect Product Analytics Data and Monitor KPIs

Web analytics tools, like Google Analytics, can make collecting data and monitoring key product analytics metrics a breeze. With Google Analytics, you can track session duration, bounce rates, and pages per session to gain a clear idea of how users interact with your website.

If you’re collecting product analytics data from multiple sources like web pages, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and email repositories, you’ll need to learn more about extracting, transforming, and loading (ETL) data. ETL processes help you integrate behavioral data, ensure its consistency and quality, and prepare it for analysis.

Are Marketing and Product Analytics the Same?

Product analytics isn’t the same as marketing analytics. 

Marketing analytics focuses on examining the performance of marketing activities to reveal the secret recipe for converting customers. Naturally, marketing KPIs differ from product analytics KPIs, although some serve both purposes.

However, marketing and product analytics share the same goal—improving customer loyalty and experience, so it’s understandable if they intersect in some aspects, such as:

Market segmentation

Product analytics examine user behavior and engagement. These findings help you segment the market and understand how to approach each group. Plus, the valuable info on customer behavior can shape the entire marketing strategy and ensure the right users are targeted with the right tactics.

Landing page optimization

Analyzing product landing pages is important for both product analytics and marketing teams. Metrics like average time on page, bounce rates, and conversions can reveal whether users have successfully adopted a product and if certain product features and the landing page need tweaking.

Conducting A/B testing

One way to examine customer behavior and preferences is to conduct A/B testing, where you compare two versions of the same product to see which one performs better. The product manager uses this knowledge to determine the right direction for product development. On the other hand, the marketing team can base their campaigns on these results and ensure the marketing strategy represents the product in the best light.

Both marketing and product teams typically compile their analytics data in the same CRM system:

• Product analysts use the platform to organize customer data, collect user feedback, map out the customer journey, and understand user behavior
• Marketing teams design product marketing strategies using the same data as the foundation

How to Implement Product Analytics: Tips and Strategies

Product analytics puts a magnifying glass on your products and services and uncovers your good and weak practices, all for continuous product improvement and high customer satisfaction.

But that’s only if you use it right. Here are some tips and tricks that can help you maximize product analytics.

Define business objectives clearly

The first agenda on your product analytics to-do list is to define your objectives.

They serve as the basis for establishing relevant metrics that keep your product teams on the right track.

Keep in mind that the goals you once defined aren’t set in stone—you can (and should) change them to reflect the latest changes in the market and user behavior. So, make it a habit to revisit them periodically (every month if you’re in a highly competitive industry).

Additionally, bolster your communication practices to ensure that your product teams are on the same page regarding these goals—otherwise, it’s easy to wander off course.

Implement effective data governance for product analytics

In order to leverage product analytics, you need to set some data governance ground rules. To do that, consider answering questions like:

• How will the product data enter the pipeline?
• What processes should product analytics teams follow when conducting any analysis?
• What is the data collection process?
• Are your data management platforms secure?
• Is the entire team on the same page regarding product analytics processes?
• What new technology will we use to analyze product analytics data?

In other words, you need data governance to define every data-related action and process to ensure security, compliance, reliability, and proper handling.

Use the right product analytics tools

How well you’ll swim through the product analytics waters largely depends on your product management tool.

However, using multiple tools for analytics workflows isn’t viable or cost-efficient. If you want to streamline product analytics, define goals, implement data governance, import data, and collaborate and communicate with your team without interruptions, ClickUp is the way to go.

As a first-class product and project management tool available across desktop and mobile apps, ClickUp packs a punch with options that can revolutionize your product development, monitoring, and marketing processes.

The platform’s unique features make it a versatile actor—it can serve as a marketing analytics software, data visualization tool, or even an organizational wizard.

Let’s see why it should be your go-to product analytics software tool.

1. ClickUp Goals to define product and business OKRs

We’ve mentioned the importance of setting clear product analytics goals early on—they’re your north star.

ClickUp has a special feature for defining objectives, and it’s called ClickUp Goals. With it, you can create timelines and set targets for tracking product progress. 

Keep your Goals organized with easy-to-use Folders. This comes in handy when you’re managing multiple products as it ensures easy navigation and organization for each offering.

Since ClickUp is collaboration-friendly, you can add your product analytics teams to your Goals in a few clicks and ensure everyone’s on the same page about future tasks. This will help promote cross-functional collaboration without breaking a sweat! Plus, every change happens in real time, so you don’t have to worry about important updates slipping through the cracks.

2. ClickUp Forms to collect user feedback

Want to know how users interact with your physical and digital products or services? All you have to do is ask!

ClickUp Forms is one of 15+ ClickUp views that let you observe your projects or tasks from different perspectives and zoom in on the specifics. In this case, you’re focusing on collecting user feedback through written customer interviews within forms.

ClickUp Forms allows you to gather info from your customers and get accurate and detailed information about user engagement and overall sentiments and attitudes toward your product. Use ClickUp’s field types (located on the left side of the form) to capture responses, like email and ratings, and build the perfect evaluation tool.

ClickUp records the responses and automatically turns them into trackable tasks for your team, streamlining the product analytics process.

3. The ClickUp Product suite assists product teams

ClickUp has an entire feature set dedicated to product operations and management—the ClickUp Product suite.

One of the features you’ll find in this bundle is ClickUp Docs, an option for creating, organizing, managing, storing, and sharing documents. Here, you can create project plans and schedules, establish data governance rules, and organize feedback in an easily searchable format.

Invite relevant team members to a Doc and work together in real-time. If you come across hiccups or want to save some time and minimize mistakes, take advantage of ClickUp AI, an AI-powered work assistant.

It can summarize texts, brainstorm with you, put together product requirements documentation, and even check your spelling, grammar, and tone! ClickUp AI can also go through your product analytics findings and extract or summarize the most important insights.

Furthermore, you can build detailed product roadmaps and brainstorm with your product teams using ClickUp Whiteboards. These infinite digital canvases give you tools for writing, drawing, leaving comments and notes, adding sticky notes, and creating connections between shapes. 

All changes happen in real time, making Whiteboards ideal for hybrid or remote teams. Use Whiteboards to map out the customer journey, visualize user interactions, and create well-etched-out strategies for enhancing customer experience.

4. ClickUp Dashboards to track key metrics and KPIs

Visualize the gathered data with ClickUp Dashboards. Customize them to reflect any business scenario—in this case, you can use Dashboards to visualize feedback, usage patterns, and other actionable insights related to user behavior.

You get 50+ cards, charts, and graphs to choose from and build the perfect Dashboard—once you’re done, you can share it across teams or export it to PDF. 

5. ClickUp templates to record key metrics and fast-track processes

ClickUp features over 1,000 templates for various use cases, from marketing and operations to finance and accounting. Thanks to the impressive selection, product managers can be 100% confident they’ll find more than one template that supports their product analytics workflows.

Our recommendation is to explore the ClickUp product strategy templates. They help you record your product’s vision, identify customers, outline objectives, and define how you’ll create value for your customers.

Our favorite go-to template? The ClickUp Product Strategy Template!

If you’re looking for options that highlight clear communication and save time, check out ClickUp daily report templates. They help you regularly update your team on the work that was completed, set priorities, and plan ahead. Product managers can also benefit from customer journey templates.

Business Intelligence and Analytics

It’s easy to get confused between business intelligence and analytics concepts.

Business intelligence focuses on analyzing data that helps organizations take informed next steps. Sounds similar to product analytics, right? 

Business intelligence and product analytics share some similarities, but they differ in scope. Business intelligence tools analyze product and customer data on a much bigger scale, often using complex procedures. They reveal info about the entire company’s performance, while product analytics tools focus only on data that could be relevant for optimizing a specific product.

As business intelligence tools are packed with robust features for data integration, analysis, and visualization, you could definitely add them to your product analytics toolbox. Still, everything you need from business intelligence can also be available in quality product analytics software tools.

The Future of Product and Data Analytics

The product analytics market has been growing steadily. The market grew significantly even during the COVID-19 pandemic, and further research predicts that the global product analytics market will grow to a whopping $16.69 billion in 2028 (it was at just $5.25 billion in 2020!).

Factors like market segmentation, the need for continuous improvement, and competitive markets fuel this expansion and emphasize the importance of product analytics in all spheres.

It’s safe to assume that we’ll see even more AI and machine learning in product analytics tools. Expect even more personalization, especially in terms of offering unique customer experiences.

Just like now, strategic management and smart decision-making will dictate the success of your product analytics efforts and help you optimize resources to maximize results.

ClickUp: Your Ultimate Product Analytics Tool

Thorough product analytics gives you all the info you need to create a high-value product or service.

ClickUp’s powerful features make it an excellent product analytics tool. Use it to collect and visualize data on user behavior, identify areas of improvement, and come up with strategies that will jumpstart success.

Sign up for ClickUp and start exploring its product analytics superpowers today!

The post Using Product Analytics Data to Boost Customer Success and Marketing Strategies appeared first on ClickUp.

The post Using Product Analytics Data to Boost Customer Success and Marketing Strategies appeared first on ProdSens.live.

If only we could have a magic spell that turns prospects into loyal customers, every business would be the next Apple, Inc.

Since that’s not the case, we must figure out effective strategies to ensure and improve product adoption. We must build a foolproof product, invest in its marketing, and do our best to boost user engagement. 

The outcome is well worth the effort, though. Smile.io’s research shows us that, on average, the top 10% of customers spend two times more per order than all other users.

In this guide, we’ll discuss all things product adoption. Besides the basics needed to understand the concept, we’ll explore the methods of measuring it, common challenges and how to overcome them, and strategies you can implement to boost product adoption and customer success. 

What Is Product Adoption?

Product adoption, or user adoption, is the process your customers go through before deciding to integrate your new product or feature into their daily lives or business operations. It represents the completed set of actions that signifies the new users have found value in the product.

Product adoption is similar to product acquisition but they have distinct goals:

1. Acquisition: Focuses on discovery—what brings visitors to your website, how they learn about your product, and what turns them into early adopters
2. Adoption: Focuses on customer retention—what turns visitors into users

Both concepts are essential, but it is product adoption that indicates long-term customer success. Having many visitors is a great start, but it won’t mean much if those visitors don’t convert into buying customers.

The Importance of Product Adoption

Product adoption is a universally adopted key performance indicator (KPI). It helps product teams understand whether their product strategy and development efforts are successful. It’s reflected in many other sales and product management metrics, some of which include:

• Customer lifetime value
• Conversion rate
• Customer retention rate
• Churn rate
• Customer engagement score
• Average user monthly recurring revenue
• Customer acquisition costs
• Cost per lead

The aim is to identify and quantify the actions that indicate product adoption. By doing so, we can objectively assess whether our product has met its primary goal—providing the benefits it was designed for.

When you know which actions convert new users into long-term users, you can optimize the product so the users repeat said actions. 

Even a slight increase in the product adoption rate is highly impactful. The sooner the users adopt the product, the sooner they’ll find value in it and the more value they’ll accumulate over time.

6 Stages of Product Adoption

The new product adoption process represents the customer journey from the initial discovery to repeated product use. It usually consists of the following six stages:

1. Awareness 
2. Interest
3. Evaluation
4. Trial
5. Activation
6. Adoption

You should treat each product adoption stage with the same level of care and attention. They’re all crucial to getting the user to the finish line, which is satisfaction with the product.

Stage 1: Awareness

During the awareness stage, users discover your product and its potential benefits. This is where product marketing steps onto the stage.

Marketing ensures your target user base becomes aware of your product and its ability to solve their problems. In some cases, it even unearths the problems themselves. 

For your product development and marketing efforts to be effective, you must have a deep understanding of the customers’ pain points.

Having an established and well-known brand can give you a headstart. If the users already trust you, they’ll be more willing to try and adopt your new product or feature.

Stage 2: Interest

If the awareness campaign is fruitful and the users feel like your product has the potential to benefit them, they will become interested in it. They will continue exploring your product, assessing how it aids in their jobs to be done (JTBD). 

Many factors can influence users’ interest. For instance, discovering the product at the right time can be pivotal in the users’ decision to investigate it further.

When it comes to innovative and unconventional solutions, you need to invest more in marketing to convince the users to look into them. 

Stage 3: Evaluation

At the evaluation stage, users are considering your product as a viable solution to their problems. They’re paying attention to its cost and additional benefits like customer support. It’s crucial to make all the information easily accessible to them.

Potential customers and users will also seek word-of-mouth recommendations and online reviews. They will compare your product to other options on the market. Finally, they’ll decide whether to try the product or not.

During the evaluation stage, you should focus on highlighting the advantages of your product over its competitors, allowing your product positioning efforts to come to the fore. Offering discounts, bonuses, free trials, and demos can tip the scale for some users.

Stage 4: Trial

At this point, users are sampling your product. They’re weighing factors like:

• Whether the product delivers on its marketing promises and solves their problems
• How user-friendly the product is
• How well the product fits into their tech stack

Success at this stage depends on the design of your product and its onboarding experience. Make sure to provide sufficient resources and support to facilitate learning about your product’s capabilities.

To identify areas for improvement, use heatmaps and session recordings. Qualitative feedback in the form of interviews and surveys is also valuable. 

Stage 5: Activation

Activation occurs when users first discover the true worth of your product. This stage is the necessary stepping stone between the initial exploration and full endorsement.

Your job is to help the users reach the activation stage as soon as possible. Activation may look different depending on the user profile, so you should adjust your efforts accordingly. 

You can accelerate the process by showcasing examples of using your product and offering templates to help them get started quickly. 

Stage 6: Adoption

When users adopt your product, it means they’ve made it a regular part of their personal or professional lives. The price they’ve paid and the effort they’ve invested into exploring and testing have now paid off. If the product hits the spot for them, existing customers may even spread the word and become promoters of your brand.

Now that you’ve gained the users’ trust, direct your efforts toward keeping it. You can do so through customer retention strategies, loyalty programs, milestones, and continuous product improvement. 

How to Measure Product Adoption: Top Product Adoption Metrics

We measure product adoption with the product adoption rate, which is the percentage of potential users who have become regular users of the product, i.e., loyal customers. 

Product adoption is a complex concept, so measuring its true scope can be challenging. First, you must define what constitutes the adoption event—the series of actions that indicate the user’s acceptance of the product. 

To determine how much value customers are getting from the product, we use various product adoption metrics, such as:

• Conversion rate: The percentage of users who’ve completed both the signup and the first key action that indicates adoption
• Time to value: The amount of time (minutes or clicks) users need to get measurable value of the product they’ve purchased
• Onboarding completion rate: The percentage of users who’ve gone through the product onboarding process
• Usage frequency: The frequency of log-ins or user sessions during a period, which indicates the number of daily active users
• Frequency of purchases: The average number of purchases users make within a specific period
• Customer satisfaction score: Subjective measure of short-term satisfaction at different points in the customer journey
• Net promoter score: Subjective measure of how likely the user is to recommend the product to someone else, indicating long-term satisfaction and loyalty
• Customer lifetime value: The total profit made from users during their relationship with the product

Analyzing product adoption metrics gives us the tools to track and analyze user behavior and preferences. They allow us to hone our product development strategy to ensure continuous user satisfaction. 

Overcoming Hurdles in the Product Adoption Process

Below, we’ll discuss the most common product adoption roadblocks companies face and propose some solutions:

Lack of product visibility

Users won’t adopt your product if they don’t know it exists or recognize the need for it. The competition is usually high, so you must find a way to stand out and raise awareness about your product. Here’s how you can do that:

• Get familiar with your target demographic and understand what it needs
• Conceptualize the product with product-market fit in mind, creating a value proposition for users
• Build effective marketing and product education campaigns, highlighting the product advantages that are relevant to the audience

With a valuable product and effective marketing, you can achieve critical mass even before the product launch, setting your product up for success.

Technical difficulties

Say the users are aware of your product and find it promising. They go on to try it enthusiastically but are met with confusing design, a deluge of features, or annoying bugs. Their enthusiasm will likely dwindle. They won’t even test the product, let alone adopt it.

To nip this problem in the bud, do the following:

• Invest in user experience (UX) design and test your product to perfection 
• Continuously analyze product analytics and customer feedback, then use it to optimize the product
• Build a smooth onboarding process and a comprehensive knowledge base
• Provide excellent customer support, responding to user queries and resolving problems quickly

High cost and budget constraints

Even if the user is aware and fond of your product, they won’t adopt it if its price is too high for them, especially if a competitor offers it for cheaper.

This problem is prevalent and difficult to solve. Lowering your prices is not always possible. 

It’s all about finding that balance—accounting for production and labor costs but still making the product affordable to your target user base. Users may be willing to shell out if the product is unique and provides high value.

4 Best Practices for Improving Product Adoption

Below, we’ll share some tips to help you boost product adoption. You’ll also learn how a comprehensive project management platform such as ClickUp can support you throughout each stage of the product adoption process.

1. Build and maintain an awesome product

The chase for product adoption begins with the conception of the product. To develop a product that users can’t live without, you must first understand their pain points and preferences. Then, you should use that knowledge to build a must-have, user-friendly product.

Proper organization is essential to any operation, especially a complex one such as product development. A productivity tool like ClickUp can make the product managers’ job easier and less stressful.

ClickUp’s features for product teams are various. The app can act as a hub for all your knowledge and documentation, strategic planning, release management, and sprint tracking. 

With its hierarchical structure and ClickUp Tasks, you can assign and schedule work, dividing it into subtasks and checklists. ClickUp’s selection of over 15 Views and 20 Custom Field types lets you personalize your workspace to meet your needs.

For example, the classic ClickUp Board view makes it easy to visualize upcoming work, such as issues, updates, and product marketing campaigns. 

You can use ClickUp Whiteboards to brainstorm with your team and craft engaging strategic roadmaps and user journey maps.

ClickUp Forms allow you to build and distribute surveys to collect information about users’ needs, bugs, and product feedback. To save you time and effort, responses can automatically convert into tasks. You can detect and resolve issues promptly, keeping customer satisfaction intact.

ClickUp integrates with many development tools, such as GitHub, GitLab, and BitBucket, allowing you to streamline your development workflow.

2. Don’t skimp on marketing

Creating hype around your product is a necessary step toward adoption. You should publish content such as blogs and social media posts, educating the audience about your product and the problem it’s trying to solve. Doing so also allows you to build authority and establish trust in your company and brand.

You can use ClickUp to plan and execute your marketing campaigns. Craft engaging content with ClickUp Docs and its rich formatting options.

Meanwhile, ClickUp AI is your trusted AI writing assistant. In only a few seconds, it can draft campaign outlines, propose ideas, summarize notes, check the spelling of your marketing content, and much more!

You can also manage the publishing of your marketing content within the app, as ClickUp’s Calendar view doubles as a content calendar. All you need to do is create content tasks and drag and drop them onto the calendar to schedule them. The view is highly customizable, allowing you to switch between daily, weekly, or monthly views and add colors, emojis, and filters.

Once the users are past the awareness stage and considering trying or buying your product, it’s important to make it easy for them to get answers. You should provide comprehensive information on your website and create mid and bottom-funnel content such as tutorials and product comparisons. 

3. Measuring product adoption for success

You should monitor your product’s performance and gather user input throughout every stage of product development and adoption. Doing so lets you be objective and make decisions that will propel your product toward success.

During the awareness stage, use SEO research tools to determine what topics your user base is interested in. Track product adoption metrics such as page views and the bounce rate to assess the performance of marketing content. 

As users become more interested, track the number of booked calls, demos, and sign-ups. Use heatmaps and session recordings to understand how users interact with your product.

Gathering qualitative information is also crucial. Create and share ClickUp Forms to:

• Gain insights into users’ needs
• Find out how they learned about your company or what made them sign up
• Get customer feedback on your product

If you measure progress during project development, you can detect bottlenecks and get ideas on improving your workflow. 

ClickUp Goals allows you to track progress toward specific targets and goals, whereas ClickUp Dashboards gives you a real-time overview of your work and resource usage. With over 50 cards, you can customize your Dashboard to display the info you need.

4. Stay connected to users

After you’ve hooked users in, do what you can to nurture the connections. 

Communicate with users in-app and externally via email. Offer support during onboarding, especially if your product has a steep adoption curve. Provide positive reinforcements for specific behaviors, celebrating each milestone. Share tips, update users on new features and changes, and offer loyalty programs and discounts as a way to say thank you.

Doing so will solidify your relationship, ensuring your users transform from early adopters to advocates.

Bolster and Accelerate Product Adoption with ClickUp

Product adoption is not an easy concept to grasp and sway. Having a well-thought-out plan and an efficient workflow can help, though. A product management tool like ClickUp assists you in your efforts, enhancing productivity and team collaboration across the board. 

With your workflow in order, an excellent and evolving product, and continuous performance assessment, your product will stand out in the competitive market and your users will remain content.

Sign up for ClickUp and discover all the ways it can ensure seamless product development and adoption.

The post Product Adoption: Definition, Stages, Challenges, and Improvement Strategies appeared first on ClickUp.

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Ever wonder how much of your time spent working amounts to something tangible?

You’ll be surprised to know just how much of your time and energy goes into work about work! More than half your day likely goes into activities related to tasks rather than the core tasks themselves.

If you’re still wondering, we’re talking about non-productive ‘work’ like responding to emails or messages, asking for inputs, attending meetings, waiting for approvals or feedback, locating documents, data, or files—you get the gist.

This is true not just for you, but also for users of your application and/or product. Fortunately, slash commands can simplify tasks and reduce them to a few keystrokes or clicks. Here’s a detailed look at this time-saver of a feature and how you can use it to improve user engagement for your product!

By the way, did you know you can use slash commands in ClickUp?

What are Slash Commands?

We all have some go-to keyboard shortcuts we use regularly to save ourselves time. For example, there are the basic Ctrl/Cmd + S to save a file, Ctrl/Cmd + C and V for copying and pasting elements, etc. 

Slash commands are something like that—but better. You may have used some already in apps like Slack. 

Slash commands are shortcuts that begin with a forward slash (“/”). When followed by a keyword or an action, they tell the platform to perform a function (or a set of functions). They’re a power user’s secret to working faster. 

Benefits of Enabling Interactivity by Incorporating Slash Commands

Slash commands are fairly common across messaging apps, social media platforms, and collaboration tools. We love them because they save us time and effort. As a developer, you may have often used these to streamline work and expedite action. If you haven’t yet thought of extending the same comfort and convenience to the users of your app, here are some reasons you should try them:

Quick action

Slash commands reduce user inputs to just a few taps or clicks. Users no longer have to expand and scan every menu option to find and execute a command. All they need do is simply enter the forward slash followed by the command into the input field and the platform will do the rest.

So, whether they wish to type a response message, assign someone a task, set a reminder, or more, they can do it instantly and seamlessly with minimal effort.

Keyboard shortcuts

A slash command is like a process improvement tool for keyboard-centric workflows. It allows users to access almost the entire feature set of the platform and interact with it with minimal user input. It is particularly handy for your power users who prefer text-based interfaces that are more comfortable, natural, and expedient than using a mouse. That’s not to say that these commands are entirely textual—some are hybrid and support mouse inputs. This way, you can offer flexibility based on user preference.

Reduced cognitive load

Slash commands are the ultimate productivity tools; they prevent users from feeling overwhelmed by reducing the cognitive load attached to a task. Rather than memorizing platform navigation or keeping tabs on various buttons or icons, users can simply remember a fixed set of commands for the repetitive action. It also eliminates any interface clutter by making these commands more intuitive.

Since these are often global commands, simply entering the forward slash character will display a series of actions or responses. This clear and consistent method of initiating action frees up mental bandwidth for more complex work.

Consistency across platforms

Just like Ctrl + S is a universal command for ‘Save,’ you also have global commands across different platforms and applications. Once users become more familiar with the general syntax, they can use the same slash commands across multiple apps to further streamline and expedite their work. These application commands also reduce the learning curve in adopting a new software solution or platform, which will help you improve usage and adoption.

Faster collaboration

Slash commands are a key feature of most communication platforms that support collaborative work. They streamline communications and task executions in shared workspaces. Such a foundation for collaboration makes it easier for teams to initiate a specific action, share inputs, retrieve information, assign tasks, access shared resources, issue reminders, etc. The direct and standardized nature of slash commands helps users work quickly, efficiently, and in real-time to streamline collective work.

Automation and integration

In a way, a slash command is a messaging or document automation strategy. A process with multiple steps gets reduced to a forward slash and a command. These commands can also trigger other automated workflows and create a chain reaction supporting the larger goal.

Further, applications that support slash commands can integrate with other compatible platforms to expand functionality and applicability. This lends interoperability between different services or environments where you can use standard or consistent syntaxes to execute or complete a task.

Improved accessibility

Slash commands enhance accessibility as they are an alternative to graphical interfaces. This text-based layout can be a plus for power users, who often strongly prefer keyboard interactions. At the same time, it also makes the digital platform accessible to individuals with specific accessibility requirements relating to the use of a mouse or graphical interface.

The standardization of slash commands also makes it more predictable and streamlined, even for new users who have yet to explore the lengths and breadths of the application. Further, the simplicity and consistency of slash commands make it inclusive for all users regardless of their technical background and other capabilities.

Room for customization

The standardization of the global slash commands feature makes them useful in almost all settings. However, another USP of this feature lies in its customization capabilities. You can create slash commands for the specific needs of your application and tailor workflows or overall digital experiences.

Create custom slash commands and incorporate them into the platform and integrated services. These get stored in a modifiable library of slash commands, along with a short description of their role. You can also explore making certain custom slash command functions accessible to certain users so they can tailor these. This ability to adapt tools and workflows according to specific working styles accelerates productivity and helps your users achieve more in less.

Tips, Tricks, & Best Practices for Slash Commands Implementation

Now that you understand how slash commands benefit your application, let’s look at a few best practices for implementing them. These are:

• Memorable syntax: Use simple, easy-to-remember, and intuitive syntax while designing slash commands. Doing so improves their recall value and improves adoption rates
• Templatize success: For general functions for which slash commands are already present, consider templatizing the same while adding it to your software application or platform. This will grant familiarity and promote the adoption of slash commands
• Document everything: Offer clear and comprehensive documentation for the list of slash commands. Incorporate use cases, descriptors, and explanations in this library to demonstrate how users can leverage these slash commands
• Implement access control: Introduce access control to manage (or allow users to manage) access to specific slash commands based on the user role and permissions. With this mechanism, only authorized individuals can perform certain functions
• Standardize them: Make slash commands consistent throughout the platform. Also, integrate the slash command functionality throughout the application to introduce consistency in the UI and UX
• Support customization: Allow users to customize slash commands for their personal needs. Such flexibility will help them extract more value from slash commands while delivering their specific requirements
• Test for edge cases: Test the performance of your slash commands across various scenarios. While doing so, also test for edge cases to identify potential errors that can disrupt the user experience and usability
• Optimize performance: Test the responsiveness of slash commands to ensure quick response times. Slow, delayed, or glitchy execution can lead to user frustrations and erode the efficiency of slash commands
• Reinforce security: Implement robust security measures to prevent the misuse of slash commands. Ensuring proper authentication and authorization also prohibits unauthorized users from accessing sensitive commands
• Seek feedback: Establish a feedback mechanism to collect user feedback on slash commands. Such a feedback loop paves the way for continuous improvement and refinement of the slash command functionalities and applicability
• User education: Facilitate the onboarding of users and share helpful guides, tips, and other resources to encourage users to pick up slash commands with minimal learning curve

Error Responses and How to Send Them?

Error responses display messages when a slash command cannot execute for various reasons. Such error messages must be structured to offer value and push helpful suggestions for overcoming the problem. Otherwise, the user will only get frustrated and abandon using the feature or the platform entirely!

In short, you need actionable error messages to prompt users into addressing the problem and moving ahead. Here are a few tips, tricks, and best practices for sending actionable error messages:

• Follow a format: An error response should follow a well-defined and consistent format indicating that a problem has occurred. Additionally, it should typically contain three elements – a brief description of the error, possible reasons for failure to execute the command, and instructions on resolving the problem. This three-part error message would be more informative than a generic error response
• Adopt a user-friendly language: The message should be simple and user-friendly. Avoid any tech-heavy terms or complicated jargon wherever possible. You want even a layperson to understand why the command failed and how they can address the issue
• Offer context: Displaying why the slash command failed to execute offers context-specific information that can come in handy while troubleshooting the problem. This will clarify why the command failed to execute and how users can fix the cause. For instance, if someone is trying to make an unauthorized entry into a database, let them know that they don’t have the admin privileges for this request, and they can either abort or obtain the same
• Implement rate-limiting: If your error messages are not actionable or lack requisite information, the user may attempt to run the command repeatedly. Rate limiting can effectively shield against spamming and continuous attempts at incorrect code execution. Let the user know that they have exceeded command running rates and to retry after a specific duration
• Extend additional help: Although error responses must be comprehensive, there’s only so much that you can display in the limited space of a dialog box or pop-up. To prevent users from getting stuck, offer them an option to explore a library of help topics and possible solutions
• Incorporate local or cultural elements: If the application supports different languages and serves various regions, factor in these variables to tweak the user experience. For example, users from the US follow the MM/DD/YYYY format, whereas those in Asia or Europe follow the DD/MM/YYYY format. Adjust the default value of input parameters based on such variations to prevent instances of error
• Error logging and monitoring: Implement an error logging and monitoring mechanism at the back end to capture error details. These logs can help developers identify frequently occurring errors and test for the related scenarios in future upgrades

The above considerations can improve error handling and contribute to the overall value proposition of slash commands. Now, let’s dive into how we use slash commands in ClickUp.

Enhancing User Interaction with ClickUp Slash Commands 

As a brand that values productivity, we’ve been massive fans of slash commands from the start. After all, a slash command condenses multi-step processes to the minimum—often into a single workflow. 

And that’s why we introduced ClickUp Slash Commands across the platform.

Slash commands are available with every ClickUp plan; guests can also use them. Additionally, we made them available across:

1. Task and subtask cards
2. Task/subtask descriptions
3. Comments
4. Whiteboards
5. ClickUp Docs
6. Chat
7. Notepad
8. Command Center

We don’t mean to brag, but that’s kind of a big deal considering how this is a native offering available throughout the ClickUp environment. Since it is a standalone feature, you don’t even have to depend on third-party apps or channel integrations to access them. Of course, you can always integrate with your favorite tools or platforms like Slack and Discord that offer something similar. But with ClickUp, one is all you need!

Here are a few commonly used slash commands that you can use on ClickUp:

• /me = assign a task to yourself
• /attach = add an attachment to the task, chat, or editor
• /bul = create a bulleted list
• /check = prepare a checklist
• /ai = open the ClickUp AI menu 
• /write = use the ClickUp AI to generate content
• /block = implement dependency blocking
• /doc = create a ClickUp Docs file
• /today = set due date as today
• /move = move a task to another List
• /priority = assign a priority to a task
• /sd = indicate the starting date of a task
• /s = change the task status

Check out the entire slash command list available on ClickUp. Use them to offer contextual help and automate repetitive tasks—the possibilities are endless.

Slash Repetition With Slash Commands

Slash commands are helpful wherever speed, precision, and simplicity are paramount. They are productivity tools that introduce automation, make operations more user-friendly, reduce cognitive load, and help people collaborate and communicate seamlessly.

Such a bouquet of advantages makes these commands a powerful addition to feature-rich project management tools. Go ahead, give them a try!

If you’re looking for other ways to be more productive and save precious time, use ClickUp for your project and workflow management. Don’t take our word for it, try it for free today.

The post Slash Commands: Enhancing Functionality and User Engagement appeared first on ClickUp.

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As a product manager, your day-to-day activities probably involve building product roadmaps, defining features, creating PRDs, prioritizing tasks, or collaborating with cross-functional teams to bring a product to life.

But to execute these tasks efficiently, you’ll need the right product management tools to simplify your workflows and keep track of your project’s progress.

And as your peers and teams deliberate the options available to them, two names keep cropping up in their discussions—Productboard and Aha!

So, let’s look at what these tools are all about. We’ll break down Aha! Vs. Productboard in terms of features, pricing, support, and more to ensure you have all the information to make an informed choice. 

We’ll talk about a powerful new alternative, too. By the end of this comparison, you’ll have a clear idea about which product development software is right for you and can get down to doing what you do best—creating amazing products!

What Is Productboard? 

Productboard is a project management tool that provides a centralized space for collecting feedback and organizing product ideas and feature requests.

It’s a complete solution that helps product teams understand user needs through feedback, prioritize which product features to build, and align everyone to be on the same page.

With Productboard, project managers can create a product roadmap and collaborate with other teams on the development process. It is also a dedicated system to record project tasks, roles, and results.

Productboard features 

Productboard offers a variety of features to enrich your product development journey from ideation to delivery. Here’s a pick of some of the best:

1. User feedback portal

The feedback portal is a space to collate all customer feedback. Product teams can systematically collect, analyze, and act on user insights. The portal pulls in comments from various sources, like Zendesk, Teams, and Slack. 

This feature helps identify customer problems, needs, and areas for improvement. It ensures that your product is focused on real customer needs. 

2. Roadmap planning and collaboration

Productboard’s usefulness is not limited to product teams, though. This tool allows you to collaborate easily with the engineering and development teams using a visual product roadmap. 

The platform lets you customize roadmap views based on your chosen parameters. Now, you can communicate product plans, milestones, and timelines to all project stakeholders, ensuring everyone is on the same page and can focus on shared company objectives together.

3. Feature prioritization and scorecards

Productboard’s Weighted Scoring Prioritization framework also allows you to rank and prioritize features and set feature development timelines using customizable scorecards. Simply align with your product strategy and identify high-impact items to streamline decision-making for product teams.

The weighted scoring process is highly intuitive, with a visual interface to set and define weights. You can also filter features based on their prioritization score.

Productboard pricing

• Essentials for individuals: $25/month per user
• Pro for small teams: $75/month per user
• Enterprise: Custom pricing

What Is Aha!? 

Aha! is a comprehensive and customizable software development platform. It helps ideate product plans, create and manage roadmaps, and execute product strategy. 

Like Productboard, Aha! provides a centralized space for product teams to collaborate, align goals, and streamline the product development lifecycle. 

Product management professionals have adopted it widely due to its flexibility, integration, and customization options. 

Aha! features 

Aha! is one of the most sought-after product management software in the market for a reason. It has a wide range of features to build products and assess their success seamlessly. Let’s take a look at some of its biggest advantages: 

1. Strategic road mapping

Aha! allows you to craft and communicate a clear product strategy using visual roadmaps. You can align your team around key goals, initiatives, and release plans—all through the roadmap—fostering a shared understanding of the product’s direction.

2. Ideation and idea management

You can easily ideate, record, and refine product ideas with Aha!’s Ideas feature. This allows you to prioritize concepts and transition promising ideas into actionable items.

3. Release planning and dependencies

With Aha!, you can plan releases and manage dependencies between multiple features. This ensures a coordinated and well-organized approach, minimizing bottlenecks and optimizing timelines. 

4. Integrations and customization

Aha! can integrate with many other tools for your work. This empowers product teams to work with familiar tools while maintaining a centralized platform for team collaboration.

Aha! pricing

• Aha! Roadmaps: Starts at $59/month per user
• Aha! Ideas: Starts at $39/month per user
• Aha! Notebooks: Starts at $9/month per user
• Aha! Develop: Starts at $9/month per user 

Also Read: The top Aha! alternatives

Aha! Vs. Productboard: Features Compared

Now let’s see how the Aha! vs. Productboard comparison pans out.

Both Productboard and Aha! let you collaborate with teams over the product roadmap, collect and manage customer feedback, and prioritize tasks and feature requests.

Both platforms offer customers extensive support resources such as documentation, tutorials, and webinars. Additionally, they provide customer support through email, phone, and live chat.

Aha! stands out for its strategic road mapping, idea management, flexibility through integrations, and customization options. However, its extensive feature set may be too complex for small teams. The high level of customization required can lead to decision fatigue, which might influence your Aha! vs. Productboard decision.

On the other hand, Productboard excels in collaborative product development with its scorecard prioritization and user feedback portals. It has been praised for its user-friendly and customer-centric approach to product development.

1. Pricing

Both Aha! and Productboard have monthly and annual pricing plans. But you always run the chance of paying much more than you signed up for to use all their essential features.

Aha!

Aha!’s pricing plan breaks the software development process down into sections. It offers a beginner’s fee to use Aha!’s Ideas. Once done with ideation, you need to pay an additional fee to move on to creating roadmaps. 

You’ll also have to pay more to use Aha!’s platform for product development. So, your total bill may run up to $100 per month to build your product end-to-end.

Productboard

Productboard’s pricing plan is more traditional. However, you can only access basic ideation and road mapping features under the Essentials plan. You must purchase the Pro or Enterprise plan to use the customer feedback portal. 

2. Ideation and feedback

Both Aha! and Productboard provide robust idea management capabilities. They allow you to create, assign, prioritize, and track ideas, but there are some differences in how each lets you do that. 

Aha!

Aha! lets you capture ideas and feedback from various stakeholders through custom portals, email integrations, and direct submissions. You can categorize, evaluate, and prioritize tasks and features using their custom criteria and scoring mechanisms.

Productboard

Productboard lets you collect input from various sources, including customer feedback, user stories, internal team discussions, and market research.

Through its features, Productboard emphasizes the importance of understanding user needs and prioritizing features based on user feedback and strategic goals. You can consolidate and collect customer feedback, identify trends, and link feedback to specific features or initiatives.

So, if your organization values user inputs from the ideation stage, Productboard is a clear winner in the Aha vs. Productboard comparison.

3. Roadmap visualization

While Aha! offers the space to create highly customizable and interactive product roadmaps, ProductBoard’s roadmap visualization feature is much more streamlined and intuitive. 

Aha!

With Aha!’s robust roadmap visualization feature, product managers can create and share visual roadmaps to communicate strategic plans and product direction. 

Users can create multiple roadmap views, including timeline-based and list-based roadmaps. You can even customize roadmaps in Aha! to align with different stakeholder needs and include various items such as features, initiatives, and goals.

Productboard

Productboard also provides dynamic roadmap visualization capabilities. However, it emphasizes the importance of creating roadmaps based on user feedback and strategic objectives. 

Roadmaps in Productboard are designed to be flexible and adaptable, enabling teams to adjust plans based on changing priorities and market dynamics.

Both tools boast features that can appeal to different people depending on their working style or needs. So it’s tough to pick a winner in this regard.

Aha! Vs. Productboard on Reddit

So, which product development software is better?

We looked at Reddit for answers to the Aha! vs. Productboard conundrum. All in all, both tools are much appreciated by their users for their varied features and capabilities. 

This is what a Reddit user had to say when asked about using Productboard as a product management tool:

“Productboard is pretty comprehensive for a reasonable price. For smaller organizations that need a feedback loop and only have 1-15 members on the product team (that would need control over managing the roadmap and views), it’s the best bang for the buck you’ll find.”

When asked about Productboard competitors, they wrote:

“Aha is probably the #1 tool for larger organizations + value to product managers. It has more comprehensive features that allow you to get into the nitty-gritty of prioritization and multiple frameworks (RICE, Value vs. Effort, etc.).”

Meet ClickUp—The Best Alternative to Aha! Vs. Productboard

Productboard and Aha! have their own sets of pros and cons. Ideally, you’ll need a tool that combines all their best features under one umbrella. 

Meet ClickUp! 

This all-in-one productivity and collaboration platform consolidates your tech stack and provides all the features, integrations, and customizations you need to manage your entire product lifecycle. 

But how can ClickUp help in product management?

First, you can brainstorm and ideate with your team on ClickUp Whiteboards. It helps you strategically plan and build your product roadmaps and track updates and launch dates with all the stakeholders in real time. 

Then, ClickUp Docs can help you document your plans and set your product’s objective. You can customize product plans, checklists, and notes with intuitive styling and formatting options. You can even add images, charts, and more, all in one place accessible to the whole team.

You can also exchange real-time feedback with ClickUp’s Chat View. It’s a simple way to align your team goals, submit ideas, track issues, and resolve them on one platform.

But is ClickUp the best alternative to Aha! and Productboard? Here are some features that make ClickUp stand out:

1. Product management

ClickUp brings together project management and product development on one tool. ClickUp Product Management Software helps you to plan, prioritize, design, report, and release products effectively and on time.

Create Gantt charts in ClickUp to define your product roadmap visually. Collect and manage feedback, epics, and sprints into the shared product roadmap. Track performance, goal progress, and more in real time. Also, get a high-level overview of your work and share it with your team with ClickUp Dashboards.

ClickUp’s unique integration capabilities allow you to create customer feedback loops through Zendesk, Intercom, and Zapier. You can also track progress with native app integrations for GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket.

2. Software team project management

ClickUp’s Project Management platform enables software teams to easily manage product ideas, work efficiently, and stay connected with all relevant stakeholders in the project.

Since it allows software developers to visualize progress, dependencies, and blockers, it becomes easier to prioritize tasks and goals.

However, ClickUp’s standout advantage lies in its ability to streamline bug issues. You can collect bug issue requests with the help of intake forms and readily convert them into trackable tasks for your team to prioritize and fix. 

You can also link related issues, add tags, and manage your backlog with custom fields, statuses, and rollups.

3. Sprints

Compared to the most popular sprint planning tools available in the market, ClickUp Sprints markedly simplifies sprint management by allowing you to set sprint dates, assign points, and mark priorities. 

This all-in-one productivity platform is designed to be a workspace where product teams can seamlessly strategize, allocate, and execute.

It doesn’t end there! ClickUp also provides many sprint planning templates to plan and execute product development plans swiftly.

ClickUp pricing

• Free Forever: Free
• Unlimited: $7/user per month 
• Business: $12/user per month
• Business Plus: $19/user per month
• Enterprise: Contact for pricing

Power your Product Management Journey with ClickUp

Aha! and Productboard are widely admired for product management and roadmapping, making the Aha! vs. Productboard decision a difficult one. However, both tools come with their fair share of drawbacks. They can be expensive to smaller businesses and difficult to learn due to their complexity and need for customizations.

This is where ClickUp stands tall. A feature-rich Free Forever plan combines the best of task management, product development, and collaboration features without burning a hole in your pocket!

In addition, with ClickUp AI, you can fast-track your product plans and documentation, streamline user feedback, and more with expert-crafted AI tools from within the platform.

So why not give it a try? Sign up for ClickUp’s Forever Free service today to get started!

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A business may survive okay in varying market conditions, but for it to thrive, you need to optimize its value chain activities to ensure superior performance. Established businesses are often those that constantly enhance the value they deliver to customers and shareholders, as well as other stakeholders involved.

It’s not just about improving products and services, though—you must also micro-analyze your inbound and outbound logistics, human resources management, and other operational processes to widen profit margins.

That’s precisely why forward-thinking managers rely on value chain analysis (VCA) to gain a true competitive edge in their niche. The practice requires constantly improving primary and support activities in a business with a vision to build customer loyalty and enjoy cost savings, all leading to competitive advantage through stable value creation.

In this article, we’ll explore:

• The value chain concept
• Its role in optimizing business models
• The process of conducting a value chain analysis—from both cost and product differentiation perspectives

What Is Value Chain Analysis?

Prominent economist and Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter first explored the concepts of value chain and value chain analysis in his book The Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance.

Value chain refers to all the processes throughout the entire product or service lifecycle, starting from the R&D stage all the way down to the distribution and sales phases. Each process in the chain can be analyzed for the incremental value it adds to the final product or service, which is exactly what value chain analysis is all about.

It’s the process of analyzing the primary and support activities involved in delivering the product and maintaining business. The purpose is to determine which processes contribute reasonably to the value delivered by the final product or service.

A careful value chain analysis helps businesses unlock new insights that enable them to deliver maximum value to their customers and stakeholders. By the end of a successful analysis, managers should be able to:

• Reduce costs across value chains
• Pinpoint processes instrumental to the delivery
• Identify opportunities for operational and technological improvements
• Optimize marketing and sales initiatives for better customer experience

Tip: Looking for a Porter-style analysis of competitive forces in your market and their impact on your value chains? Try out the ClickUp Porter’s 5 Forces Template for quick visualizations.  

How Can a Value Chain Analysis Benefit Businesses?

Some of the key benefits derived from Porter’s value chain analysis include:

• Product differentiation: One of the more obvious benefits of value chain analysis is sustaining superior performance to enjoy lasting customer loyalty. This includes revisiting existing processes and strategies to develop new products, features, and services that align with evolving customer needs in a competitive scenario
• Cost reduction: Value chain analysis gives a bird’s-eye view of which process adds or subtracts value in your current business model, helping recognize efficiencies and inefficiencies. These insights can help you decide which processes automate, eliminate, and optimize to increase profit margins
• Growth-oriented innovation: Careful analysis of the value chain framework can also reveal repetitive business processes and complex dependencies that may stunt growth and productivity, giving you the window to tweak the processes involved

All in all, you get to achieve operational differentiation, which generates distinct advantages that your competitors find difficult to replicate. And in the long run, this translates to stronger brand perception and improved year-on-year profitability.

What to Include in Your Value Chain Analysis

Value chain analysis encompasses exploring processes across two main categories: primary and secondary activities.

Primary functions or activities consist of core processes for developing and distributing any product or service. They add value to the offering directly. A typical analysis of primary functions requires you to explore:

1. Inbound logistics: They cover the supply chain; examples include receiving raw materials and warehousing
2. Operations: Procedures such as manufacturing that turn raw materials into finished goods
3. Outbound logistics: They include activities like packaging, sorting, and shipping that enable the delivery of the final product or service
4. Sales and marketing activities: These are promotional and sales funnel activities
5. After-sales service: Processes related to customer service, repair, and maintenance

On the other hand, secondary activities don’t play a direct role in sales or production but support the primary functions instead. You can expect these activities to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their primary counterparts. The four main secondary activity heads include:

1. Procurement: It’s closely related to the inbound logistics part of primary activities; covers areas like order processing and managing resources like inventory
2. Human resource management: Examples include hiring, training, retention, and compensation of employees
3. Infrastructure maintenance: Covers research and advancements made to improve business processes, overhead management, and financial planning 
4. Technological development: Helps lower costs related to technology and enhance process automation

By considering all these components while conducting a value chain analysis, you can derive a well-rounded operational strategy and better quality control.

How to Conduct a Value Chain Analysis

Value chain analysis requires disaggregating primary and secondary processes into strategically similar pockets, allowing for simplified value chain management.

There are two main approaches that you can adopt for a value chain analysis:

1. In the first approach, you aim to derive a cost advantage in the industry to enjoy a profitability boost
2. The second approach focuses on achieving a unique product differentiation that’s valued by customers and allows you to charge premium prices over your competitors

Let’s explore both approaches one by one. We’ll also see how ClickUp, a complete work and project management solution, can help you conduct a value chain analysis quickly and effectively.

Approach 1: Cost advantage analysis

From a cost advantage perspective, value chain analysis aims to help you lower the cost of producing or delivering the product or service that you sell. The result? You get to sell your offering at a lower price than your competitors without compromising on margins. Cost advantage VCA is typically a five-step process: 

Step 1: Identify primary and secondary activities

The first step to doing a cost advantage value chain analysis is to identify the primary and secondary activities in your business operations. The idea is to estimate the range of cost reductions that can be achieved realistically.

The general rule is to be careful while reducing the costs of primary activities because they’re directly linked to your product. There’s no point in introducing modifications that compromise user experience. 

A good way to organize the information you need during this step is by using the ClickUp Product Management Suite. It’s perfect for centralizing your value chain analysis for any industry or niche—write process documents, build roadmaps, and visualize the entire product lifecycle.

Need a quick start? Get comfortable with the ClickUp Value Chain Whiteboard Template. Its pre-designed visual framework allows you to organize all your primary and secondary activities and establish their relationship with the profit margin. Get your analysis team to link tasks, documents, or even individual products directly into the template and collaborate seamlessly.

If you are managing more than one business, create multiple templates to map out individual value chains in dedicated project Workspaces within ClickUp.

Step 2: Record the contribution of each process to the cost pool

The next step is to figure out the share of each activity in the overall production and delivery cost and see how it compares to the value added by it. In this process, you’ll see that some options, like factory overheads, cost a lot but also offer tremendous value to your core offering. 

On the other hand, certain processes are just unnecessary cost centers as they don’t add much value to the chain. Use the information from this exercise to determine the scope for meaningful cost reductions.

Need assistance here? The ClickUp Project Cost Analysis Template can come in handy. Get into the depth of your operational expenses with five different views to analyze your operational costs, including overhead costs, variable costs, material costs, and fixed costs. It also lets you analyze them on parameters like total price, cost, quantity, unit cost, and cost type.

Step 3: Identify major cost drivers

Once you know which activities contribute the most to your overall costs, it’s time to identify individual cost drivers. Cost drivers are unit components of expenses that are shared between various departments. They may fractionally influence the final price of a product.

For instance, the cost of manufacturing a product covers several components, like the cost of raw materials and labor. Cost drivers of labor expenses can include total machine hours, the number of deliveries, and idle time.

The cost drivers will be specific to your industry, but you measure them by:

• Tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) 
• Using cost comparison tools

The goal here is to find specific cost optimization opportunities within a broad function.

Step 4: Analyze links and relationships between activities

Value chain activities are often closely linked to each other—tweaking one aspect can positively or negatively influence the cost, efficiency, and profitability of another. For instance, if you’re a logistics company, then a change in warehousing location can go both ways: say, it increases your transportation cost or makes your delivery cycle faster and more cost-effective. 

To sum it up, any cost advantage should not be at the expense of service quality or overall profitability. That’s why it’s crucial that you identify and analyze relationships between interconnected activities in your value chain.

A good way to understand these relationships is to visualize them. You can use ClickUp Dependencies to do that easily. Link interconnected tasks in your workflows and use the Relationships option to specify the type of dependency. You can pick:

• Waiting on: Allows you to link tasks that must be completed before the task in question
• Blocking: Lets you add tasks that must wait until the task in question is marked as done

You can also visualize task dependencies using ClickUp’s Gantt View. When in your task list, simply switch to the Gantt view, and you can see how different tasks are dependent on each other. The big picture allows you to make informed decisions about your value chain analysis.

If you want to visualize dependencies or your entire value chain activities, jump on ClickUp Whiteboards. You get an infinite canvas to demonstrate your workflow or product chain using texts, connectors, shapes, sticky notes, and other media components. It supports multiple live collaborators, making it a perfect brainstorming tool for remote teams.

Step 5: Automate and innovate your processes for cost reduction

Finally, once you have an idea of your primary activities, secondary activities, and their cost positioning, start devising strategies for cost reduction.

Depending on the type of activities that you’re modifying for cost differentiation, you may need help from the product development or marketing teams. For instance, if the cost advantage is supposed to come from enhancing product management activities, then the product team becomes a close stakeholder throughout the change process.

Many teams end up upgrading their company infrastructure by adding automation tools to their arsenal. Automations helps get rid of many repetitive and redundant processes, helping achieve cost differentiation effortlessly.

Luckily, as a one-stop product management tool, ClickUp offers 100+ built-in Automations to automate repetitive processes that your team may be doing manually. It’s fully no-code—just define a trigger event, an action that’s to be taken when the workflow is triggered, and publish your automation. It’s not only about minimizing labor costs but also about taking care of cumbersome processes that steal a chunk of your time.

Once you’ve finalized a cost optimization plan, use ClickUp Goals to track and manage your costs against the targets that you’ve set. You can connect your goals to actual tasks to help your team find the reasoning behind the changes proposed. Visualize your targets with reports like progress bars and line charts on ClickUp Dashboards.

Approach 2: Product or service differentiation advantage analysis

This type of analysis aims to differentiate your product or service from the competition by adding a unique feature or advantage that provides significant value to the customers. The advantage should improve your offering and be difficult to replicate for your competitors. Let’s see how you can conduct the value chain analysis for arriving at product or service differentiation:

Step 1: Identify your core value contributors

Not all business activities are equally impactful on customer experience and value. Identifying low-value processes is the key to carving out major product differentiation advantages. You can do this by collecting and analyzing customer or user feedback because only they can tell what their pain points are and what would bring them more value.

The ClickUp CRM has a rich set of functionalities to help you out here. From categorizing your customer accounts to streamlining client communication and lead pipeline, it supports you through everything.

For instance, if you want to collect customer feedback in an organized manner, you’ll love ClickUp Forms. Tailor your survey form with questions specific to your value chain and distribute them across channels with a single click. The responses collected are automatically stored in your Workspace. You can go to the Table view to analyze them in one place. 

Step 2: Find sustainable key differentiator(s)

Once you’ve analyzed customer feedback and identified the main contributors or loopholes in your value chain, think of ways to improve. Innovation is the key, and your product development teams may want to devise some new features based on the desired product or service differentiation.

But not all improvements are sustainable from a financial or operational perspective. Some business process improvements significantly increase your costs, while others are so complicated that they can’t be scaled to your business.

Need help deciding what differentiation to implement? You can use the ClickUp Prioritization Matrix Template to identify the sustainability of each proposed value improvement. Just plot each idea on the X and Y axes of this template in the order of impact and effort. You and your stakeholders will get a visual insight into which value improvements are sustainable and worth implementing. 

Step 3: Protect your differentiation

This last step is often overlooked, but it’s super important. Once you’ve devised your business process improvement techniques to achieve product or service differentiation, also devise some processes that allow you to protect your advantage. It helps you stay relevant and have your differentiation advantage in the market for a long time.

So, file a patent or put up layers of protection around your best practices and trade secrets. Create information silos. Do whatever it takes to protect your differentiation, leaving little room for competitors to replicate your offering and dilute your competitive edge. 

If you still feel stuck, you can use ClickUp’s expert-designed value stream templates with color-coded sections to visualize the relationship between your business activities. The ClickUp Value Stream Mapping Template is excellent for brainstorming product differentiation techniques.

Run a Successful Value Chain Analysis and Find Your Differentiation with ClickUp

If you want to gain a 360° understanding of your business processes, value chain analysis is the way to go. 

ClickUp’s templates, Whiteboards, integrations, and CRM suite can help monitor and optimize your value chain framework consistently. Its workflow automation and process optimization features can help your team members maximize their efficiency further, thus giving you a cost advantage.

So, get ClickUp for free, and start leveraging it to march ahead of your competition steadily and surely.

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Introducing new products and services and diversifying your portfolio is a crucial part of any successful business strategy. It allows you to seize new market opportunities, stay ahead of the competition, and drive sales and growth.

But you can’t just toss any product that comes to mind into the mix. You must first carefully evaluate your goals, market conditions, competitive environment, and the performance of existing products and services.

This is where a sound product portfolio management strategy becomes indispensable. It ensures that your entire offering always aligns with what your customers want while staying true to your brand identity and broader business objectives.

Not sure how to properly manage your product portfolio? We’ve got your back with some handy tips to help you nail this process. Plus, we’ll throw in a couple of tools and features to supercharge your product portfolio and set yourself up for lasting success!

What Is Product Portfolio Management?

Product portfolio management (PPM) entails planning, developing, and managing your entire line of products or services. It ensures that your offerings perform optimally and align with your objectives and customer demands at any moment.

As opposed to product management, which covers a single product, product portfolio management is concerned with the entire lifecycle of all your products, from ideation and product development to launch, improvement, and eventual retirement or replacement.

Benefits of Having a Product Portfolio Management Strategy

Implementing and maintaining an effective product portfolio strategy provides numerous advantages. Here are the most notable ones:

1. Optimal resource utilization: Regularly reviewing and fine-tuning products to match market trends and demands can help businesses allocate budget, time, and talent meaningfully
2. Risk mitigation: Product portfolio management lets you identify and stay on top of factors that can affect the performance of your existing products and, consequently, your bottom line
3. Facilitates innovation: Product portfolio management helps businesses stay ahead of the curve by identifying market gaps and adapting to new market trends and demands
4. Customer satisfaction: Increases customer retention and conversion by helping businesses meet customer demand and cater to diverse customer segments 
5. Improved financial performance: Optimizing investments by focusing on products with the highest potential for growth can increase revenue streams

Best Practices for Successful Product Portfolio Management

Product portfolio management is no walk in the park, but with the right approach, you can ensure that every product in your offering contributes to your company’s strategic objectives. 

Check out our seven battle-tested tips and techniques for making informed decisions about your product portfolio, optimizing resource allocation, and boosting your overall profitability.

1. Define your business goals

The first—and arguably the most important—step in creating any strategy is setting the goals and objectives you aim to achieve.

For product portfolio management, this means clearly outlining your overall business goals and how your products can support them. This may include setting revenue targets, developing market plans, or comparing your performance against industry benchmarks. 

By setting clear goals, you ensure that each product contributes meaningfully to your organization’s overarching mission and vision and that your product portfolio management strategies are optimized to achieve them. If your products aren’t contributing, it’s time to consider modifying or replacing them.

If you don’t want to go through this process from scratch, the ClickUp SMART Goals Template can help you set practical goals and track their progress to completion. 

2. Create a product roadmap

Like a map guiding you on your journey, a well-crafted product roadmap directs your product to its destination with pathways, planned detours, and clear objectives.  

A roadmap provides an overview of the vision and direction of a product and its evolution over a period of time. Ultimately, it ensures that your product remains on the right track by coordinating your efforts and facilitating balanced decision-making.

Tracking each product’s lifecycle helps you allocate resources at every stage of the journey and adjust product portfolio management strategies accordingly. You want to ensure your products are well-equipped to reach their goals, adapt to changing circumstances, and sail smoothly through any storm.

The ClickUp Product Roadmap Template helps you visualize your product development lifecycle and track your progress as you complete tasks. 

3. Establish a review schedule

The product portfolio management process should be dynamic, responsive, and resilient, able to adapt to market changes on the fly.

To enable this, establish a review schedule that helps keep your products in check, ensuring they align with your overall goals and market demands.

The review process should involve assessing your products’ current performance and identifying new opportunities for growth and success. 

Regular reviews also facilitate coordinated team collaboration efforts in product development and lead to more efficient solutions.

4. Communicate and collaborate

By fostering a collaborative environment with effective communication strategies, your team can work toward achieving set product goals and respond swiftly to emerging issues or challenges. 

Besides internal, open lines of client communication are also essential for optimizing product portfolio management strategies. They ensure that your products and services are in sync with the demands and needs of end users and other stakeholders. 

To improve your internal and external communications, try the ClickUp Communication Plan Template.

5. Let data be your guide

Analyzing and understanding the performance metrics of individual products helps you identify major performers and optimize them for better outcomes. This lets you adapt to changing market dynamics, ensuring your products stay relevant and competitive. Some of the best frameworks for conducting this kind of analysis include the SWOT analysis, BCG matrix, and the McKinsey matrix.

On the other hand, analyzing competitor data lets you position your products more effectively and identify areas for improvement. This gives you a competitive edge and helps you stay ahead of the game.

Finally, through a cost-benefit analysis of each product, you can evaluate profit and returns, enabling you to allocate resources more purposefully.

6. Prepare for risk

In a generally uncertain business world, one thing is sure—risks are bound to arise at some point. This can include changing market conditions, new competitors springing up, or economic downturns.

However, by taking a proactive approach to dealing with these risks, you can better navigate the uncertainties and mitigate their potential impact on the performance of your product portfolio.

In essence, product portfolio management aims to identify risk indicators and assess their potential effect. It’s also essential to prioritize risks based on the likelihood of occurrence to determine those that require immediate attention and those that can be managed for extended periods. 

Considering the above, developing risk mitigation strategies and contingency plans is crucial. You should assign responsibilities and timelines for executing them to ensure they are implemented effectively.

Lastly, regularly reviewing risk mitigation strategies against changing business conditions and market shifts ensures they remain relevant and well-positioned to tackle new risks.

Need an effective way to implement these risk mitigation strategies? Try the ClickUp Risk Management Risk Register Template and stay ahead of the curve!  

7. Implementing feedback and adjustment strategies 

Product portfolio management is a cyclical process of developing strategies, implementing roadmaps, incorporating feedback, and back again.

To ensure that your products meet customer needs and align with the organization’s goals, it is vital to establish functioning feedback mechanisms. This could be customer surveys and reviews for evaluating the performance of individual products.

Leveraging user feedback can help you gain valuable insights and make adjustments based on potential impacts and alignments with specified goals. This enables you to maintain a competitive edge and ensure that your product portfolio remains relevant and thriving in the long run.

If you want an effective way to stay on top of customers’ opinions and sentiments about your products, the ClickUp Product Feedback Survey is the way to go. Use the collected insights to make appropriate changes to your product portfolio, whether introducing new products or retiring existing ones.

Top Tools for Effective Product Portfolio Management

Managing a diverse range of products can be complex and challenging. In addition to mastering all the tips and tricks, having the appropriate tools in your toolkit is essential to streamline the process.

In this section, we’ll introduce you to ClickUp, a first-class product management and productivity platform that has all the tools you need to bring your product portfolio management game to an entirely new level!

1. Product management software

Product management software solutions offer a centralized platform for overseeing the entire portfolio management process, automating workflows, and improving efficiency and productivity. 

These tools are ideal for promoting collaboration and facilitating product roadmapping and strategic planning—all you need to manage your product portfolio effectively. 

ClickUp is a perfect example of a well-designed product management tool, offering a robust set of features to assist you in setting goals and seeing them through your entire product development lifecycle. 

The platform has a hierarchical structure that helps you customize and organize products and product lines efficiently. From Workspaces down to Lists and subtasks, these flexible structures help you manage complex product-related tasks easily.

The ClickUp Portfolios feature allows you to create and manage multiple product tasks simultaneously. You can also track the progress and status of each task in real time and prioritize assignments easily. Customizing your product portfolio with color codes and filters allows you to categorize each product based on its status or priority level.

Furthermore, with ClickUp Custom Fields, you can customize task fields and attribute them with relevant product details, such as market type, market segment, etc. You can also use ClickUp Tags to categorize tasks based on priority level or product types, making it easier to filter through specific aspects of the product portfolio.

2. Collaboration and communication tools

Product portfolio management requires constant collaboration between cross-functional teams to achieve set goals and deliver on product strategies. Furthermore, streamlined communication facilitates decision-making by keeping everyone involved aligned with product objectives.

This is where tools like ClickUp Whiteboards come into play. They provide an infinite virtual canvas for collaborative ideation, product planning, and problem-solving. Whether it’s brainstorming ideas for a product’s direction or synergizing to carry out joint tasks, ClickUp Whiteboards has your back.

In addition to their real-time collaboration features, Whiteboards allow you to move swiftly from ideation to action by assigning tasks, setting deadlines, and tracking progress directly within the tool.

Collaborate on various product documents like roadmaps and requirements with ClickUp Docs, the platform’s text editor and document management system. It can serve as the single source of truth for your company’s product portfolio management efforts. 

Add links and images, tag team members, leave comments, and connect the Docs to your product workflows to keep everyone on the same page. 

ClickUp Chat view is another valuable feature that allows team members to communicate via text in threaded conversations, making it easy to partake in multiple discussions.

You can use mentions to bring specific team members into the conversation. And with tags, you can assign and categorize comments and tasks for easier organization and tracking.

3. Customer relationship management (CRM) tools

Customer sentiment plays a big part in product portfolio management. Strategic decisions about which products to develop, market, and retire are geared toward meeting customer needs and demands. Therefore, you need a tool that can help you keep track of how customers interact with your company products and services.

ClickUp CRM and ClickUp Sales provide a set of features for managing essential aspects of your product portfolio, including sales data, customer feedback, and product performance metrics. They allow insights into customer buying behavior and preferences, which can inform product development and marketing strategies.

4. Analytics and reporting tools

Analytics and reporting tools allow you to gain insights into product performance, track progress, and make informed decisions about your product portfolio that align with your goals. 

ClickUp offers various reporting features to help you stay on top of product performance and see how it impacts your goals and objectives. With ClickUp Dashboards, you can measure, track, and visualize performance through key performance indicators (KPIs) and up to 50 customizable cards. Use the Dashboards to get a high-level overview of how your resources are allocated toward different products and identify bottlenecks and areas for improvement in your product portfolio management workflows.

Make Product Portfolio Management a Breeze with ClickUp

Product portfolio management is an iterative process that demands continuous product lifecycle tracking, strategy reviews, and team collaboration. A well-managed product portfolio is flexible, data-driven, and customer-focused.

A trusted solution for achieving all of that? ClickUp! 

ClickUp offers an all-in-one platform for managing your diverse product offerings, synergizing your team for success, and guiding your product journeys every step of the way. Sign up today and revolutionize your product portfolio management!

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