Selecting the right product management software can be a game-changer for your company’s efficiency and success.

But with so many options available, how do you decide which one is the best fit for your needs?

Let’s explore 12 of the best product management platforms to see which one is for you!

TL;DR

• To choose the right product management software, you should identify your specific needs, evaluate features, check integrations, review pricing, and read reviews.
• Here are the best tools for product analytics:

1. Mixpanel: Offers advanced real-time analytics, funnel analysis, retention tracking, A/B testing, and user segmentation with customizable dashboards.
2. Amplitude: Excels at user journey analytics, predictive analytics, and real-time insights. Plus, it has behavioral cohort analysis and pathfinding tools.

• Here are the best tools for collecting customer feedback:

1. Qualaroo: Provides targeted surveys, question branching, real-time reporting, and multi-language support with easy integration options.
2. UserVoice: It collects feedback from multiple channels, uses voting systems for prioritization, and offers customizable feedback forms with real-time updates.

• Here are the best tools for creating product roadmaps:

1. Aha!: It helps with roadmap visualization, goal setting, release management, idea management, and detailed reporting and analytics.
2. Productboard: Allows for feature prioritization, roadmap planning, customer feedback integration, and cross-team collaboration.

• Let’s go over the best tools for team collaboration:

1. Slack: It facilitates channel-based communication, direct messaging, video and voice calls, and extensive integrations with third-party apps.
2. Trello: Uses boards, lists, and cards for visual project management, customizable workflows, automation, and mobile access.

• Let’s explore the best tools to manage the product lifecycle:

1. Jira: It supports agile methodologies with Scrum and Kanban boards, backlog prioritization, bug tracking, and detailed reporting.
2. Asana: Offers project and task management, timeline and calendar views, automation, custom fields, and comprehensive reporting.
3. Monday.com: It provides customizable workflows, visual project tracking, integration with third-party apps, and templates for agile frameworks.

• If you’re looking for an all-in-one solution that covers all aspects of product management, book a Userpilot demo to see how it can transform your product management processes.

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How to choose product management software?

Choosing the right product management tool is crucial for streamlining processes, improving collaboration, and driving product success.

And when implemented well, it will enhance productivity, assist decision-making, and ultimately lead to a more successful product.

That said, here’s what you need to evaluate before choosing one for your business:

1. Identify your needs: Figure out your needs then make a list of must-have features versus nice-to-have features to guide your decision.
2. Evaluate features: Ensure the software offers the functionalities you need, such as task management, user feedback collection, data analytics, and collaboration tools.
3. Check integrations: Integration with your current tech stack (like CRM, communication tools, or development platforms) is essential for maintaining workflow continuity and data consistency.
4. Review pricing: Look out for hidden costs, such as fees for additional seats, premium features, or support services.

Best product management tools for analytics

Let’s go over the analytics use case first.

Mixpanel

Mixpanel is a powerful real-time analytics platform that can keep track of your product usage and user behavior while supporting mobile and web apps.

It’s particularly good at tracking product analytics metrics to show how users interact with your product and display data in real-time, so you’ll always be looking at the most current information.

Main Features

• Advanced analytics and reporting to track user behavior.
• Funnel analysis features to visualize and analyze the steps users take to complete a specific task.
• Retention analysis tools for measuring how often users return to your product.
• A/B testing features for testing the performance of different versions of your product strategies.
• User segmentation to categorize users based on behavior, demographics, or other criteria.
• Customizable dashboards for creating personalized dashboards and monitoring the metrics that matter the most to your team.

Pricing

• Free plan: Includes analytics essentials and templates.
• Growth plan: $28 per month, including advanced analytics and unlimited reports.
• Enterprise plan: Custom pricing for large organizations requiring data warehouse ingestion, data governance, and automated provisioning.

Amplitude

Amplitude is an analytics tool that focuses on product intelligence. It helps a product manager understand user behavior, predict outcomes, and optimize the user experience (with features like advanced user segmentation, funnel analysis, and retention analysis).

It excels particularly at user journey analytics, as it has cross-platform analytics which allows you to track how users navigate between your native apps, mobile apps, and web pages.

As a result, Amplitude is a great choice for product teams who need to monitor multiple platforms, monitor predictive analytics, and find deep behavioral insights.

Main Features

• Behavioral cohort analysis: Identifies groups of users based on their actions within the product.
• Pathfinding analysis: Maps out the user journey to understand users’ paths and identify key behaviors that lead to conversion or churn.
• Predictive analytics: Uses machine learning to predict future user behavior.
• User segmentation: Segments users based on various criteria.
• Retention tracking: Provides insights into how different features or updates impact user loyalty.
• Real-time analytics: Provides immediate insights into user behavior.

Pricing

• Starter plan: Free product management tools like product analytics, templates, and user journeys.
• Plus plan: Starts at $49 per month. Includes behavioral cohorts, unlimited analytics, and custom events and dashboards.
• Growth plan: Custom pricing for fast-growing businesses, with advanced behavioral analysis, dedicated support, multivariate testing, causal insights, and much more.
• Enterprise plan: Custom pricing for large organizations, includes cross-product analysis, advanced data management, assigned account manager, and more.

Best product management tools for customer feedback collection

Customer feedback collection is a key feature of product management. Let’s explore some tools.

Qualaroo

Qualaroo is specifically made for collecting customer insights. It allows you to create and distribute surveys of any type inside your product on websites and mobile.

It provides many useful features including question branching, A/B testing, AI sentiment analysis, and more—as well as templates for different types of surveys, like exit surveys, confirmation page surveys, customer satisfaction surveys, etc.

It’s also great for running many types of analysis, including statistical analysis, cross tabs, nudge for prototypes, and so on. Product teams can leverage it to send targeted, in-context surveys that deliver high-quality feedback.

Main Features

• Targeted surveys to specific user segments based on behavior, location, or other criteria.
• Question branching to customize survey paths based on user responses.
• Real-time reporting to get immediate feedback and insights from your surveys.
• Multi-language support for collecting feedback from a global audience.
• Integration with third-party platforms like Slack, HubSpot, and Google Analytics.

Pricing

• Free plan: Includes everything for free, but it’s limited to 50 responses.
• Business plan: At $19.99 (billed annually) per 100 responses/month. You can ask for custom pricing if you need more than 1000 responses.

UserVoice

UserVoice is a premium feedback tool that can collect and organize feedback from multiple sources. It comes with a customizable feedback portal, in-app widgets, and direct integrations with your email client, CRM, or support tool.

The platform is designed for teams who embrace product discovery. It helps you validate features, prioritize the development of specific functions based on feedback, and close the feedback loop with scalable tools.

Main Features

• Gather feedback from multiple channels, including web, mobile, and email.
• Use voting and ranking systems to identify the most impactful suggestions from your users.
• Analyze feedback from different user segments.
• Customizable feedback forms.
• Real-time updates to keep users informed about the status of their feedback.

Pricing

• Essentials plan: $699 per month, includes core feedback collection, analytics, and prioritization features. Supports up to 200 unique users providing feedback.
• Pro plan: $899 per month, for collecting feedback from your website or product and communicating with users about the status of their feedback. Supports up to 1000 unique users.
• Premium plan: $1349 per month, allows you to cross-reference feedback with revenue, integrate with Salesforce, and supports up to 5000 unique users.
• Enterprise plan: Custom pricing, offering advanced security and dedicated support for large organizations.

Best product management tools for product road mapping

Aha!

Aha! is a comprehensive road mapping tool that helps you plan and visualize your product strategy. It offers tools for customer research, whiteboarding, analytics, and product strategy.

But what sets Aha! apart is its robust features that support strategic planning, idea management, and detailed road mapping. You can brainstorm concepts with whiteboards, use AI to draft documents, create workflows, and manage your product development roadmap to make sure you’re working toward tangible business goals.

Main Features

• Roadmap visualization: Create visual product roadmaps that communicate your strategy and timelines clearly to all stakeholders.
• Goal setting: Define and track goals and objectives to ensure your product development aligns with business strategies.
• Release management: Plan and manage product releases, including timelines, milestones, and deliverables.
• Idea management: Capture, prioritize, and manage ideas from your team and customers.
• Reporting and analytics: Generate detailed reports and analytics to track progress.

Pricing

• Premium plan: $59 per user per month. Includes essential features for small teams such as roadmaps, AI, whiteboards, reports, and more.
• Enterprise plan: $99 per user per month. Offers unlimited viewers and reviewers.
• Enterprise+ plan: $149 per user per month. Lets you track OKRs, create customer tables, plan your team capacity, and more.

Productboard

Productboard is a product management platform that enables you to prioritize features, align teams, and create a clear product roadmap. It offers tools for strategic product planning, cross-team collaboration, and go-to-market alignment.

But when it comes to creating a product roadmap, Productboard lets you follow a user-centric approach. This is done by integrating customer feedback directly into the road-mapping process.

Main Features

• Feature prioritization: Score and prioritize features based on customer needs, business objectives, and technical feasibility.
• Roadmap planning: Create and share visual roadmaps to align your team and stakeholders on the product strategy.
• Customer feedback integration: Collect and centralize customer feedback from many sources directly into one single hub.
• Cross-team Collaboration tools: Facilitate team collaboration with shared notes, comments, and real-time updates.
• Customizable workflows: Tailor workflows to fit your team’s processes.

Pricing

• Starter plan: Free to use. It’s limited to 50 feedback notes, 1 team space, 1 objective, and one product portal.
• Essentials plan: $19 per maker per month, includes 250 feedback notes, release planning, usage reporting, and prioritization criteria.
• Pro plan: $59 per maker per month. Add unlimited feedback notes, manual customer segments, and more customization.
• Enterprise plan: Custom pricing for large organizations who need unlimited team spaces, Salesforce integration, granular permissions, and customer success support.

Best collaboration tools

Slack

Slack is a widely used collaboration tool that facilitates communication and collaboration within teams through channels, direct messages, and integrations. It offers real-time messaging capabilities, automation, AI assistant, and extensive integrations with other tools—making it THE central hub for team communication.

Main Features

• Channel-based communication: Organize conversations into channels based on teams, projects, or topics.
• Direct messaging: Enable private conversations between team members.
• Slack AI: Get up-to-date with your team strategy by asking the AI, summarize conversations, and get recaps for the day.
• Integration with third-party apps: Connect with over 2,000 apps and services, including Google Drive, Trello, and GitHub.
• Video and voice calls: Conduct video and voice calls directly within Slack.

Pricing

• Free plan: Basic messaging and collaboration features with limited message history and integrations.
• Pro plan: $4.38 per user per month, adds full message history, group calls, and more integrations. The AI add-on is available.
• Business+ plan: $15.00 per user per month, includes advanced security, compliance, and administration features.
• Enterprise Grid plan: Custom pricing for large organizations with enhanced security (HIPAA-compliant message and file collaboration) and support.

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Trello

Trello is a visual collaboration tool that uses boards, lists, and cards to help teams manage projects and tasks efficiently.

It offers automation, customizable workflows, and product management templates that can help you organize tasks, track project progress, and optimize productivity without needing any programming knowledge.

Main Features

• Board and card system: Organize tasks and workflows visually with a drag-and-drop system.
• Customizable workflows: Adapt boards to fit your project’s specific processes, such as building a roadmap, strategic planning, or assigning tasks to team members.
• Automation (Butler): Automate common tasks and workflows to save time.
• Product management templates: for product roadmaps and Agile sprints.
• Power-Ups: Allow your teammates to link their preferred development tools with Trello.
• Mobile app: Access and manage boards with the mobile app.

Pricing

• Free plan: Basic project management features with unlimited boards, lists, and cards.
• Standard plan: $5 per user per month, includes advanced checklists and unlimited boards.
• Premium plan: $10 per user per month, adds features like calendar view, timeline view, and priority support.
• Enterprise plan: Custom pricing for large organizations with enhanced security and administration features, unlimited workspaces, and multi-board guests.

Best product lifecycle management tools

Jira

Jira is a project management software primarily used for agile software development. It has robust features for tracking and managing tasks, extensive customization options, and it’s focused on supporting agile methodologies like Scrum and Kanban (making it ideal for startups).

Jira is originally designed for agile development, as well as spotting, tracking, and fixing bugs smoothly—making it ideal for dev teams.

Main Features

• Agile boards (Scrum and Kanban): Visualize tasks and workflows using Scrum or Kanban boards. Includes dependency management.
• Backlog prioritization: Manage and prioritize the product backlog.
• Reporting and analytics: Generate detailed reports and analytics to track project progress, team performance, and sprint outcomes.
• Bug tracking: Prioritize bug fixing and view them on a single board.
• Integration with development tools: Connect with tools like Bitbucket, GitHub, and Confluence.
• Time tracking: Track time spent on tasks to monitor productivity.

Pricing

• Free plan: For small teams of up to 10 users, with basic project management features.
• Standard plan: $7.16 per user per month, includes multi-region data residency, external collaboration, and advanced roles and permissions for unlimited users.
• Premium plan: $12.48 per user per month, adds AI features, cross-team planning, dependency management, and 1000 automations per user.
• Enterprise plan: Custom pricing for large organizations that need cross-product analytics, unlimited automation, enhanced security, and priority support.

Asana

Asana is a task management tool designed to help teams organize, track, and manage their work efficiently. It includes a great variety of project views (kanban, calendar, workload overview, scrum, etc.), supports Agile frameworks, has dependency management, helps you assign granular tasks and sub-tasks, and integrates with important tools like Slack and Google Drive.

All of these features are free (with even more advanced capabilities in the paid version), making it a popular choice for various types of teams, from small startups to large enterprises.

Main Features

• Project and task management: Create projects, assign tasks, and track progress.
• Timeline and calendar views: Visualize project timelines and deadlines.
• Custom fields: Add custom fields to tasks and projects.
• Automation rules: Automate repetitive tasks and workflows.
• Reporting and analytics: Generate reports to gain insights into project performance and team productivity.

Pricing

• Basic plan: Free, includes essential project management features for small teams.
• Premium plan: $10.99 per user per month, adds more advanced options like timeline view, custom fields, advanced search, and more.
• Business plan: $24.99 per user per month, includes more nuanced features like portfolio management, approvals, and custom rules.
• Enterprise plan: Custom pricing for large organizations with enhanced security, control, unlimited seats, and support.

Monday.com

Monday.com is an all-in-one platform that enables teams to build custom workflows to manage their projects and tasks. It offers collaboration tools for many departments, including CRM, marketing, HR, IT, support, and product development.

Monday Dev, in particular, is designed to cover a wide range of product management needs. This can involve road-mapping, Agile sprint backlogs, capacity planning, bug tracking, feature requests, and product retrospectives.

Main Features

• Customizable workflows: Build workflows tailored to your team’s processes.
• Visual project tracking: Use boards, charts, and dashboards to visualize project progress and performance.
• Integration with third-party apps: Connect with tools like Slack, Google Drive, and Jira to streamline workflows and enhance functionality.
• Automation: Automate repetitive tasks and processes to save time and reduce manual effort.
• Templates for Agile frameworks: Includes roadmaps, feature requests, sprint management, bug tracking, and retrospectives.

Pricing

• Free plan: For up to 2 seats. It’s limited to 1000 backlog items and simple product task management.
• Basic plan: $9 per user per month, includes dedicated templates for development, an analytics dashboard, and unlimited items.
• Standard plan: $12 per user per month, adds more views, sprint management, roadmap planning, and 250 automation per month.
• Pro plan: $20 per user per month, includes private boards, time tracking, Agile reporting, cross-team roadmaps, and customer feedback.
• Enterprise plan: Custom pricing for large organizations that need unlimited automation, integrations, and seats, as well as enterprise-grade security and multi-level permissions.

Userpilot: Best all-in-one product management software

Userpilot is a product management platform designed to enhance product growth through user onboarding, adoption, and retention.

It allows product managers to create, deploy, and analyze product experiences, as well as trigger in-app surveys to collect customer feedback and understand user sentiment.

Let’s see how Userpilot fares in different departments:

Userpilot for customer feedback collection

Allows you to build in-app surveys from scratch or use any of the pre-built templates (including NPS, CSAT, CES, and PMF surveys), and trigger them based on user behavior, activity, and stage in the journey.

Userpilot for product onboarding and adoption

You can craft personalized onboarding flows to guide users through key features and ensure they get the most out of your product from the start.

With Userpilot, you get access to:

• Onboarding checklist.
• Resource Center.
• Welcome flows.
• Welcome surveys.
• Segmentation options.

Userpilot for product analytics

With Userpilot, you get the following no-code data analytics features:

• Event tracking – Userpilot lets you monitor user activity and engagement by creating custom events and tracking the relevant data. You can easily define various events using the drag-and-drop interface or write custom code for this purpose.
• Analytics dashboards – Userpilot provides a no-code custom analytics dashboard, which you can use to track core metrics, such as activation, adoption, retention, and conversion. You can even use various filters to refine the data on its interactive dashboards.
• Reports – You get several types of reports to visualize data and dig deeper into user behavior and engagement. These include funnel analysis, trend analysis, and retention tables. Also, you can use path analysis reports for a granular view of user navigation.
• User and company profiles – These help you drill down into user understanding at a granular level. With dedicated profiles, you can identify the most popular events, sessions, and sentiments of a specific user or company.
• Built-in analytics capabilities for other engagement features – From in-app flows and surveys to onboarding checklists, each engagement tool comes with built-in data analytics and helps visualize data. That means you can monitor how users interact with various in-app experiences and identify areas of improvement.

Userpilot for product marketing

Userpilot enables you to create targeted in-app marketing campaigns. This is by segmenting specific user groups to increase the relevance of your in-app messages.

With Userpilot, you can create in-app modals, tooltips, slideouts and much more with no need to code.

Userpilot pricing

• Starter: $249/month for up to 2,000 MAUs and includes all the fundamental features related to user engagement, NPS, product analytics, user tracking, and more.
• Growth: $749/month which includes advanced analytics, localization, in-app resource center, advanced event-based content triggering, and more.
• Enterprise: Custom pricing which includes unlimited team members, multiple apps, dedicated enterprise infrastructure, and so on.

Conclusion

Choosing the right product management software can significantly impact your product’s success and your team’s efficiency.

This guide has compared 12 top tools across different categories, helping you identify the best options for your specific needs.

If you’re looking for an all-in-one solution that covers all aspects of product management, consider Userpilot. Book a demo today to see how it can transform your product management processes.

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The post What is the Best Product Management Software for Your Company: Comparison of 12 Tools appeared first on ProdSens.live.

SaaS product management is about understanding user pain points, crafting features that solve real problems, and constantly improving the user experience.

The approach to managing SaaS products is entirely different from traditional on-premise software. So, whether you’re a new SaaS product manager, an experienced PM for traditional software, or just interested in gaining more knowledge, this article is for you.

We covered the processes, skills required, best practices, and tools for driving SaaS growth.

TL;DR

• SaaS product managers oversee the entire product lifecycle from product strategy to development and decline.

Step-by-step guide for the product management process

1. Identify user needs with market research.
2. Perform feature ideation based on user needs and trends in the SaaS industry.
3. Develop the product roadmap.
4. Design UX and push for development.
5. Build in-app flows to help users discover features.
6. Monitor performance with data analysis.
7. Gather user feedback and identify improvements.
8. Iterate product enhancements with A/B testing.

• SaaS solutions differ from traditional software in pricing, delivery, and customer relations, necessitating distinct product management practices. Similarly, software product managers generally have different roles compared to hardware product managers.

Responsibilities of a SaaS product manager

• Perform market and user research.
• Specify product vision and create the product strategy.
• Specify feature prioritization.
• Oversee product development and design.
• Collaborate with the product marketing team to devise the go-to-market strategy.
• Collect, analyze, and implement customer feedback to stay competitive in the SaaS space.
• Track key metrics for performance analysis.

Skills a SaaS product manager needs

• Project management.
• Problem-solving mindset.
• Ability to perform research.
• Strategic thinking.
• Technical expertise.
• Communication skills.
• User empathy.

Best practices to help SaaS companies improve their product management

• Directly speak with your users regularly.
• Collaborate closely with other teams.
• Use segmentation to improve customer experience.
• Provide self-service support with a resource center.
• Create a data-driven management process.

Best SaaS tools to facilitate product management

• Userpilot – Best for product growth.
• Miro – Best for user journey tracking.
• Figma – Best for UX design.
• Trello – Best for project management.
• Jira – Best for tracking development and bugs.
• Slack – Best for team collaboration.

Ready to understand users and perform better SaaS product management? Book a Userpilot demo to find out how.

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What is SaaS product management?

SaaS product management is the end-to-end process of creating, launching, and continuously improving SaaS products for product growth.

The SaaS product manager is responsible for overseeing the entire product lifecycle, from product strategy to product development and decline. Some SaaS companies can have multiple PMs, with a separate product management expert for different aspects of the tool.

Step-by-step guide for the product management process

So, how do you perform effective SaaS product management? Follow these steps.

1. Identify user needs with market research

Every product revolves around its users. No matter how brilliant your idea seems, it will fail if it doesn’t address user problems or fulfill their desires.

Here’s a simple process for identifying the needs of your target audience:

• Monitor industry trends: Regularly review industry reports, attend relevant trade shows, and subscribe to leading industry publications and newsletters to stay ahead of emerging trends that can inform product development and marketing strategies.
• Track competitor products: Implement a competitor analysis framework to systematically review and compare competitors’ offerings, marketing strategies, and customer feedback across multiple channels to identify areas for innovation and differentiation.
• Conduct user interviews or focus groups: Understand how users feel about the challenges they face or the solution you offer to access hidden customer insights. Ask open-ended questions to explore user needs, experiences, and feedback on your product and service.
• Use in-app user surveys and questionnaires: Trigger contextual user surveys to gain on-the-spot feedback on your product experiences. Analyze the responses and note improvement areas.

2. Perform feature ideation

Generate ideas for features that uniquely and valuably address identified user needs. Collaborate with the product management team for a brainstorming session to develop these new feature concepts.

Bring all the ideas together and prioritize them based on your business objectives. For example, let’s say you’re a tool to streamline the SaaS product management process for small, agile teams. You’ll want to prioritize features like Kanban boards and real-time chat within tasks over deep analytics (less critical for small teams).

3. Develop the product roadmap

A product roadmap is a strategic planning tool that outlines the vision, direction, priorities, and progress of your product over time. When filling out your roadmap, rank features based on effort, resources, and resulting impact.

It’s also important to clearly outline the product development process, assign responsibilities, and define a timeline for when you’ll develop and release key features. But don’t be rigid; maintain some flexibility for adjustments based on feedback and changes in priorities.

4. Design UX and push for development

It’s time to design your user experience and flow. Begin by building simple wireframes so the development team knows what you want.

Next, collaborate with the engineering teams to develop a functional prototype of the product. Share it with stakeholders and a select group of users to gather quick feedback.

Implement the feedback from prototype testing and move to the development phase. However, your job is not done here—you need to oversee the development process to ensure everything aligns with your established UX design and product vision.

5. Build in-app flows to help users discover features

Once the feature has been developed and added, take intentional steps to ensure users discover and learn to use it.

First, trigger in-app announcements using a modal, banner, or slideout. Then, implement interactive walkthroughs to guide users step-by-step through using the feature. Walkthroughs are effective for in-app guidance because they help users to learn by taking action—once the guide is over, your users will be fully equipped to begin using the feature on their own.

6. Monitor performance with data analysis

Measure KPIs that align with your goals, focusing on metrics such as:

• User engagement: Track the number of users interacting with the feature, how often they use it, and their average time spent engaging with it.
• Feature discovery: Analyze how easily users find the new feature and understand its purpose.
• Conversion rates: If the feature aims to drive specific actions (e.g., sign-ups, upgrades), monitor how it influences those conversion rates.

Utilize data analysis reports to reveal deeper insights into feature performance. For example, with trends analysis, you can examine how your KPIs change over time and note patterns in feature popularity, adoption rates, and any potential declines.

7. Gather user feedback and identify improvements

Trigger feedback surveys to gauge the user experience and understand how easy-to-use and valuable they find your product. Through this feedback, you can understand the friction points associated with the new feature and decide how best to fix them.

To make the most of feedback surveys, it’s often best to combine closed-ended questions and open-ended questions.

For example, after asking, “How helpful did you find the product onboarding?” follow up with an open-ended question like this for richer data: “Describe how you felt the first time using the new feature. What, if anything, did you find difficult to understand?”

8. Iterate product enhancements with A/B testing

SaaS product management involves continuous experimentation and iteration to ensure you remain valuable to users. A/B testing offers a structured way to evaluate these potential enhancements, confidently refining your feature (and overall product) for a competitive edge. There are three main types:

• Controlled A/B Test: The simplest form, comparing the original version (control) against a single variation with one change.
• Head-to-Head: Compares two new UX variations to see which performs better.
• Multivariate Testing: Tests multiple changes to different elements on a page simultaneously, identifying the best combination.

SaaS product management vs. non-SaaS product management

SaaS products differ from traditional software in pricing, delivery, and customer relations. These differences necessitate distinct product management practices.

Here’s how it plays out:

• Development cycle: Traditional products are offered on a one-time purchase basis, so product managers prioritize shipping the perfect product. On the other hand, the agile nature of SaaS allows for quick development cycles since managers know they can make changes/additions as required.
• Customer options: Renewing their subscriptions monthly or annually means customers are constantly rethinking their options. This puts SaaS product managers on edge to constantly update the app and ensure users don’t see any need to switch vendors.
• Feedback and analysis: SaaS product management can leverage direct customer feedback and usage data more effectively and rapidly than non-SaaS, influencing product refinement and development.
• Ongoing support: Post-launch support for traditional tools often focuses on maintenance and troubleshooting, as opposed to the proactive customer success strategies offered in SaaS.

Responsibilities of a SaaS product manager

We’ve highlighted that SaaS product managers are responsible for overseeing the development, launch, and growth of SaaS solutions.

Here’s a breakdown of the key responsibilities and how they collaborate with cross-functional teams:

Perform market and user research

The heart of successful product development is knowing your target audience. To achieve this, SaaS product managers perform in-depth user and market research to identify user needs and how to best meet them.

While conducting user research, the PM doesn’t just want to address existing needs. They find gaps in the market to fill with their product. Generally, the more market gap a product can cover, the faster its adoption rate will be.

Specify product vision and create the product strategy

A product vision is the long-term, overarching goal of what the product aims to achieve. SaaS product managers define this vision, ensuring it aligns with the company’s mission and addresses the customer needs they’ve uncovered.

After nailing the vision, the next step is to create a solid product strategy. This plan outlines how to execute the product vision, including milestones, resource allocation, and the steps required to bring the product from concept to launch.

Specify feature prioritization

With infinite ideas and limited resources, deciding which features to build first is crucial. SaaS product managers weigh factors like user feedback, market demands, technical feasibility, and business impact to create a prioritized feature roadmap.

The roadmap should outline which features get built and when. However, prioritization isn’t set in stone. Continuous data analysis, shifting market needs, and user feedback may necessitate adjustments to the roadmap, something product managers skillfully manage.

Oversee product development and design

SaaS product managers don’t directly code or design, but they’re highly involved in the development process.

They collaborate with engineers to ensure technical feasibility and guide product design teams to create user-centric, intuitive interfaces based on their research. It’s also the responsibility of the SaaS product manager to ensure features get released on time.

Collaborate with the product marketing team to devise the go-to-market strategy

A go-to-market (GTM) strategy is a comprehensive plan that outlines how a product will be introduced to the market and reach its target customers. It encompasses aspects like defining the ideal customer profile, value proposition, messaging, distribution channels, and promotional tactics.

Product managers provide crucial input into the GTM strategy due to their in-depth knowledge of the product and its target market. They work closely with marketing to develop a product marketing framework that increases awareness and boosts adoption.

Collect and analyze customer feedback

SaaS product management isn’t complete without a feedback loop.

Product managers use surveys to understand how users feel about new features. They analyze the responses, note experience gaps, and find ways to improve.

In-app surveys aren’t the only channels for collecting feedback. PMs also analyze support tickets and have interactions with key customers to gauge overall customer sentiment.

Track key metrics for performance analysis

Product managers rely on data to make informed decisions. They define and track KPIs to understand how the product performs against business goals and identify areas for improvement.

Examples of relevant metrics:

• Customer acquisition cost: Measures the cost of acquiring a new paying customer. Understanding CAC helps assess marketing and sales efficiency.
• Feature discovery: Tracks how customers interact with specific features and the frequency of those interactions. The feature discovery metric reveals which features are valuable and which might need promotion or redesign.
• Product adoption rate: Measures the percentage of users actively using the product over time. The adoption rate is an excellent indicator of the product’s value and ease of use.
• Product stickiness: Indicates how often users return to the product. High product stickiness is critical for long-term success, especially for SaaS tools.
• Customer lifetime value: Estimates the total revenue generated by a customer over their relationship with your SaaS company. Optimizing CLV is important for revenue growth.
• Monthly recurring revenue: A vital SaaS metric that measures predictable revenue each month. Tracking MRR is essential for understanding growth and forecasting.

Skills a product manager needs

Every successful SaaS product manager has a good blend of technical and soft skills.

Some of these skills include:

• Project management: A good PM should be able to plan product sprints and manage them to ensure execution.
• Problem-solving mindset: The path to product success is filled with hurdles. PMs should be skilled at identifying and solving these.
• Ability to perform research: Product managers rely on thorough market research and user insights to ground their decision-making process.
• Strategic thinking: A good PM should master the art of formulating long-term product plans that align with the overall company’s objectives and market trends.
• Technical expertise: Even if they don’t code, SaaS product managers should understand the logic behind codes so they can communicate better with technical teams.
• Communication skills: Success hinges on clear communication with teams across engineering, marketing, sales, and executives—a PM should know how to share their ideas effectively.
• User empathy: There’s no product success without user empathy. PMs must deeply understand user problems and create effective solutions.

Best practices to help SaaS companies improve their product management

Both veteran and aspiring SaaS product managers constantly need to improve their management skills.

This section shows you some best practices to get better.

Directly speak with your users regularly

Go beyond user surveys and conduct one-on-one customer interviews. This approach helps you become more user-centric, equipping you to deploy solutions users will love.

During your interviews, aim to discover the following:

• User pain points: Identify where users face trouble and how you can make their experience better.
• The language they use: Ask the right customer discovery questions and listen aptly to understand how users speak. The insights from this will guide your marketing efforts.
• Experience gaps: Understand what users expect and the changes you can make to improve their engagement rates.

Collaborate closely with other teams

SaaS product managers constantly need to work closely with different SaaS roles, including marketing, engineering, sales, and customer success teams.

Each collaboration is vital to effective product management and overall company success. Here why:

• Marketing: Aligning market research, customer personas, messaging, and go-to-market strategies increases the chance of successful product launches and adoption.
• Engineering: Streamlining communication between product and engineering ensures technical feasibility, timely development, and clear feature prioritization.
• Sales: The sales team provides valuable front-line customer insights. Product management teams equip sales with the tools and knowledge they need to sell effectively.
• Customer success: This collaboration deepens understanding of customer needs, challenges, and how the product is actually used. Working closely with the customer success team makes it easier to gain insights for product enhancements and roadmap prioritization.

Use segmentation to improve customer experience

Your customers have unique needs, preferences, and behaviors, so a general product experience won’t cut it.

Segmentation moves away from a one-size-fits-all approach. It allows you to tailor product features, messaging, and entire experiences to specific customer groups. Taking this approach to product management helps improve satisfaction and retention for each customer segment.

Provide self-service support with a resource center

Go beyond just developing fantastic features. Think of how you can improve the user experience by making your product easier to use

A robust resource center is one vital way to ensure users understand and use your features properly. When creating your support portal, include FAQs, help docs, video tutorials, and chat support to enable users to find answers independently.

Create a data-driven product management process

From feature prioritization to product development and enhancements, ensure you’re data-driven in every decision you make.

Determine the key performance indicators tied to your business growth. Then, implement in-app analytics to regularly track these metrics and understand how well you’re performing.

This data-driven approach allows you to present compelling evidence of product growth to stakeholders. The fact that everything is measurable also makes it easier to secure executive buy-ins for tools and strategies you want to use—once the software ROI is clear, approvals become much easier.

Best SaaS products to facilitate product management

The right product management tools make it easy to juggle the many hats SaaS PMs wear. We’ve compiled some of the best tools and how they help streamline your processes.

Userpilot – Best for product growth

Userpilot is a product growth tool used by PMs for designing in-app experiences, tracking user behavior, monitoring product performance, and analyzing customer feedback.

How Userpilot facilitates effective product management:

• User feedback widgets: Deploy feedback survey in-app to collect customer thoughts and opinions on demand. Userpilot has multiple survey templates you can use. The platform also allows you to customize your surveys if you want something new or can’t find what fits your user research needs.

• In-app flows: Product management requires guiding users to discover and use your features effectively. Userpilot’s in-app flows help you build custom UI elements and combine them as product walkthroughs to guide new users through your primary features. Similarly, you can implement walkthroughs for secondary onboarding—showing existing customers how to learn and master new or advanced features.

• Engagement features: Struggling to get users to take action? Userpilot’s engagement features can change that. For example, you can create a checklist with 3-5 actions new users should perform and get activated. By seeing the list of actions and how the progress bar moves when they strike off tasks, users get motivated to complete key steps. Another engagement feature you can use is the resource center builder—use it to create self-serve content users can visit when stuck.

• Analytics reports: Track key feature performance with customer behavior analysis reports like funnel analysis, path analysis, trend analysis, and more. For example, by implementing funnel analysis, you can track user progression through different journey stages (free trial conversion, onboarding, etc.) and see how easily users move from one stage to another.

• Analytics dashboards: Efficient SaaS product management involves tracking multiple metrics, which can get overwhelming sometimes. Userpilot’s analytics dashboards solve this problem. With tools like core feature engagement and product usage dashboards, you can view all your KPIs in one place. You can also build custom dashboards to reflect the KPIs you want.

• Heatmaps: Track clicks, scrolls, mouse movements, and other UI interactions for your features and identify parts of your tool with high and low engagements. The insights from your heatmap reports will help you uncover usability issues and note features that customers love.

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Miro – Best for user journey tracking

Miro is designed to enhance collaboration and streamline project management processes across teams, regardless of their location. It offers a variety of features aimed at improving project visualization, planning, and execution.

How Miro improves product management:

• User journey maps: Access pre-built templates to create user journey maps that outline steps users go through when engaging with your product. This enables you to better understand and cater to customer needs.
• Wireframing: Create low-fidelity wireframes that allow you to share the basic ideas of features you’re working on.
• Collaboration tools: Miro has features like an infinite canvas, sticky notes, and integrations with other tools. These features are useful when working with other team members in real time.
• Project tracker: Track project progress to ensure that all tasks are completed on time and within scope.

Figma – Best for UX design

Figma is a cloud-based design tool that stands out for its emphasis on collaboration, allowing teams to work together on interface design projects, prototyping, and creating design systems.

Features that help with the design aspect of product management:

• Vector graphics editor: Figma operates primarily as a vector graphics editor, enabling designers to create high-fidelity interface designs and illustrations. Its intuitive tools and flexible canvas cater to both simple designs and complex projects involving numerous layers and elements.
• Prototyping: Beyond static designs, Figma allows users to turn their designs into interactive prototypes without code. This feature can help product managers test user flows and interactions, making it easier to iterate based on feedback.
• Design systems & components: Figma enables teams to create and maintain design systems with reusable components and styles. This ensures consistency across projects and makes it easy for product managers to make updates during and after the software development process.
• Cloud-based and cross-platform: Being cloud-based, Figma is accessible from any web browser, regardless of the operating system. This accessibility facilitates seamless sharing and feedback with the cross-functional product team.

Trello – Best for project management

Trello is a visual and intuitive project management tool that utilizes the Kanban methodology. It’s perfect for organizing tasks, projects, and workflows in a simple, flexible way.

How Trello helps SaaS product managers:

• Boards, lists, and cards: Trello’s core functionality is its boards, which represent projects or workflows. Within each board, you can organize tasks and create cards representing different aspects of your workflow. This allows you a clear overview of project progress and task management.
• Automation with Butler: Trello has a built-in automation tool called Butler that can automate common tasks, such as moving cards between lists or scheduling reminders based on rules set by the user. This reduces manual work and increases efficiency.
• Customization and flexibility: Trello allows you to customize cards with attachments, links, checklists, and labels for priority and categorization. This flexibility makes Trello adaptable to a wide range of projects and workflows.

Jira – Best for tracking development and bugs

Jira is a work management tool primarily popular with software development teams. It’s highly customizable and caters to various project management methodologies, particularly Agile frameworks like Scrum and Kanban. However, Jira’s flexibility makes it useful for many teams beyond software development.

Key features:

• Issue tracking: Jira’s core function is tracking issues. An issue can be a bug, task, feature request, or any work item needing resolution. The platform provides rich fields to capture issue details, set priorities, and assign work.
• Customizable workflows: Jira’s workflows are highly customizable, allowing teams to define stages of issue resolution, from initial reporting to verification and closure. Each step in the workflow can have its own set of rules, ensuring that the process aligns with the team’s needs.
• Reporting and analytics: Jira offers comprehensive reporting tools that provide insights into project progress, team performance, and potential bottlenecks. These reports include burndown charts, velocity charts, and cumulative flow diagrams, among others, which are essential for agile teams to monitor their efficiency and adjust strategies accordingly.

Slack – Best for team collaboration

Slack is designed to replace email as the primary method of communication among team members, providing a more organized and efficient way of managing tasks, discussions, and information sharing.

Here’s how Slack makes life easier for the SaaS product manager:

• Channels: Organize conversations in dedicated spaces called channels. These can be public for anyone to join or private for selected team members, facilitating focused discussions on specific topics or projects. For example, you can have separate channels for feature ideation, product design, GTM strategy, and so on.
• File sharing: Easily share files by dragging and dropping into the Slack interface, with support for comments and reactions, streamlining review and collaboration processes.
• Searchable history: Slack archives all messages and files, making it easy to search for specific information from the past. This feature is particularly useful for tracking decisions, such as your conclusions on UX improvements and user engagement strategies.
• Integration: Slack integrates with a wide range of apps and services, enabling you to automate notifications and tasks. For example, you can integrate with Figma and easily share prototypes with your team on Slack to obtain quick feedback.

Conclusion

To thrive as a SaaS product manager, you need to embrace data analysis, stay attuned to market trends, and communicate effectively with your team and other critical stakeholders.

Userpilot simplifies the SaaS product management process. It allows you to measure user data, conduct feedback surveys, and deploy in-app experiences to boost engagement. Book a demo now to begin.

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Even if you’ve been a product manager for a while, a new feature rollout can be a challenging experience.

Fear not, though, as this article provides lots of valuable insights into the process.

We explain what a feature rollout is, why it is important for product teams, and how to conduct them. We also share some best practices.

Ready to dive in?

TL;DR

• Feature rollout is the process of releasing new functionality in small batches and to small user segments.
• Thanks to that, the development team can collect user feedback and test the feature before rolling it out to all users. This reduces risk considerably and as the releases are smaller, issues are easier to find.
• As stakeholders are often involved in the testing process, it also improves collaboration and alignment between teams.
• The rollout process starts with feature ideation. The team conducts research to identify opportunities and generates solutions.
• When new feature ideas are successfully validated, the development team starts building the feature.
• The product manager is responsible for developing the feature rollout plan, which includes information about the goals, metrics, key actions, responsible team members, and milestones.
• Feature flags, aka feature toggles, allow you to turn the feature on and off without deploying new code. This means you can first release it to your employees, next to beta testers, and increasingly more user segments afterward.
• As you’re gradually releasing the feature, gather qualitative user feedback via in-app surveys and use analytics to gain a detailed understanding of the feature usage and its impact on product performance.
• When the testing is successful, initiate the full rollout to give access to the feature to all users.
• To help users discover the feature and overcome issues independently, provide them with in-app guidance.
• Userpilot can help you announce new features, onboard users, collect feedback, and analyze their performance. Book the demo to find out more!

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What is a feature rollout?

A feature rollout is a software development technique involving a gradual release of new features and updates.

What do I mean by gradually?

The new functionality is released in small increments and to a small subset of users at a time before becoming available to the entire user base. In the meantime, it’s tested thoroughly to ensure it’s bug-free and delivers a positive user experience.

Benefits of feature rollouts for product teams

Back in the waterfall days, companies and software houses released new products only when they were ready. The development cycle, in some cases, lasted years (think Windows XP, Vista, etc.).

This changed when Agile software development came around. New functionality was released at the end of each iteration, every 1-2 weeks. This was still done in large batches and often to all users at once.

Currently, it’s the standard practice to release new functionality bit by bit, even every few hours, which has several benefits.

Identify and resolve issues early on

The first benefit of rolling features in a controlled and phased way is that it allows you to spot issues early. It takes less effort and time to find and fix bugs in small batches of code.

It doesn’t stop there.

As only a small number of users is affected initially, the impact on the overall user base and the risk of potential reputation damage is limited should things go south.

Enable faster iterations based on user feedback

When releasing features in small increments, the feedback loops are tighter, and the velocity increases.

Writing the code, releasing the features, collecting feedback, and fixing what needs to be fixed takes less time than big launches. Small releases are also easier to integrate.

Consequently, you reduce the time needed to deliver a stable and fully operational functionality.

Improve collaboration between key stakeholders

Feedback collection is not limited to users but also internal stakeholders, like the leadership or other teams.

Many organizations roll out their features internally first in a practice called dogfooding. By doing so, they leverage the unique perspectives and insights from different functions.

It gets even better.

A gradual release process gives various teams from across the organization the time to coordinate their efforts. Consequently, your marketing, sales, and customer success are better prepared to support the new functionality.

How to carry out the feature rollout process?

Ready to redesign how you release new features to your users?

Here’s how to conduct the feature rollout process, step by step.

Mind you though, that the process isn’t normally as linear as depicted below. Instead, it involves multiple iterations during which you constantly assess the performance of the new feature and implement improvements.

1. Conceptualize and design the new feature to release

The process begins with feature ideation.

This involves conducting market and customer research to identify unaddressed user needs, desires, and pain points.

You can do it by:

• Collecting user feedback and feature requests via in-app surveys and interviews.
• Analyzing competing products.
• Following industry trends and technological developments to identify new opportunities.

Once you have the problems listed, prioritize them and generate ideas on how to solve them. Instead of blindly following what others are doing, think of innovative ways to solve the problems.

Next, validate the ideas to ensure the demand is really there and that building the feature is feasible.

2. Develop the new features to be launched

Once you validate the feature idea, it’s time for the development teams to get down to work on the feature.

The role of the product manager at this stage is to ensure they are aware of any changes to specifications or requirements. As a servant leader, you also provide them with the resources necessary to do the job and remove obstacles.

2. Create the feature release strategy

As your developers are working on the new functionality, track their progress, gather feedback, and use the insights to develop the feature rollout plan.

Typical feature rollout plans include information on:

• Rollout stages.
• Goals for each stage and progress metrics.
• Key actions and responsible stakeholders.
• User segments involved in the rollout.
• Testing and feedback collection methods and protocols.
• Major milestones/checkpoints.
• A timeframe for each stage.

4. Roll out the feature using feature flags

Feature flags, or feature toggles, are like switches: they allow you to enable and disable features for different user segments without deploying new code. Thanks to them, you can customize apps for different user groups or locations.

Or for dark launches, which is yet another term for rolling out features in a controlled way.

Start by rolling out the feature to your employees. Using their own product for real-life applications across the organization enables in-depth scrutiny.

When the Alpha rollout is successful, it’s time for Beta release.

That’s when you release the feature to a selected user sample. For example, it could involve only your power users as they are the most competent and most loyal customers.

Before enabling the new functionality at any rollout stage, analyze the product performance and user behavior. Such a baseline is necessary to evaluate the success of the release.

5. Gather user feedback to improve the feature

As you release the feature to a selected sample of users, gather feedback.

In-app surveys are the best tools for the job because they allow you to reach the users. They also have higher response rates than email surveys, particularly when you trigger them contextually.

Such contextually triggered surveys appear when the user engages with the new feature. In this way, the experience is still fresh in their minds, which makes the feedback more reliable.

In your surveys, ask both closed-ended and open-ended questions. For example, you could first ask ‘How satisfied are you with the new feature X?’ (on a scale of 1 to 5) and follow it up with, ‘How could we improve the feature for you?’

Such qualitative insights are way more valuable as they give you actionable advice on how to improve the feature.

6. Measure the performance of the recently released features

While user feedback is invaluable, it doesn’t give a complete picture of user behavior and tends to be subjective.

That’s why it’s essential to back it up with user analytics.

What analytics techniques can you use to measure the performance of the feature?

Here are a few examples:

• Cohort analysis – to assess the impact of the new feature on key metrics, like user retention.
• Feature activation, usage, and adoption – how many users engage with the feature and how often.
• Heatmaps – to analyze user interactions with user interface features.
• Funnel analysis – to analyze user drop-offs when interacting with the new functionality.
• A/B testing – to compare the performance of 2 different versions of the feature or the performance of the product when the feature is enabled and when it’s not.
• Path analysis – to track the paths users take inside the product before and after the introduction of the new feature.

7. Initiate a full rollout after testing

The full rollout is a more extensive release of the feature to more user segments.

This, however, doesn’t mean opening the floodgates and releasing the feature to the remaining users at once. Instead, it happens segment by segment.

For example, you could release it to users on different pricing plans or in various geographical locations.

As you’re releasing the functionality to subsequent segments, carry on performance monitoring and implement changes as necessary.

When are you ready for the full rollout?

This depends on the test results and feedback: if you reach the goals and benchmarks outlined in your release strategy, you’re good to roll.

For some products, this may happen a bit sooner, for example, if the feature success relies on the network effect.

8. Implement continuous delivery by frequently releasing new features

Continuous delivery is a software development practice that extends upon continuous integration. In short, it involves building, testing, and preparing code changes for a release to production automatically.

The key aim of CD is to make rollouts predictable and routine operations that can be performed on demand at any time. This enables teams to release new changes to customers quickly and safely.

Best practices for creating a successful feature rollout strategy

To wrap it up, let’s have a look at a few practical tips and best practices for successful feature rollouts.

Set clear milestones for the rollout process

Clear milestones are an essential part of the rollout strategy because they allow you to monitor the progress of the release from one phase to another.

They also facilitate collaboration between teams and ensure stakeholder alignment throughout the project.

Create a constant feedback loop for testing features

As mentioned, the process of analyzing the feature performance and collecting user feedback should never stop throughout the rollout – or afterward, for that matter.

As more and more users are exposed to the feature, new issues may appear. And there are always things to improve on, no matter how polished the feature is after the full rollout.

Provide in-app guidance when implementing a full rollout

When rolling out the feature, make sure to provide users with adequate in-app guidance. This is essential for users to discover the feature and learn how to realize its value.

Start by announcing the new feature, for example, with a pop-up modal. Include a CTA button that triggers an interactive walkthrough to educate users on how to use it.

Don’t rely on them to drive feature discovery and adoption, though. Design tooltips that contextually prompt users to engage with the feature at the time when they need it most.

Finally, back it up with a resource center module so that users can access help whenever they get stuck with the new feature.

Conclusion

A gradual feature rollout enables organizations to release new functionality to their user base in a safe and controlled way. This allows them to test the feature thoroughly in real life while limiting the risk inherent to releases and launches.

If you’d like to learn how Userpilot can help you announce new features, provide in-app guidance, and measure their success, book the demo!

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The post Feature Rollout: What Is It and How to Conduct It? (+Best Practices) appeared first on ProdSens.live.

Product webinars are a great way of keeping up-to-date with the latest news and trends in product management in an accessible way. We’ve collected some of the best product management webinars for 2024, so you don’t miss out.

TL;DR

• A product webinar is a virtual seminar showcasing and discussing a product’s features and benefits as a marketing and sales tool.
• Userpilot’s webinar “5 Ways How to Use Microsurveys in Your SaaS” covers efficient feedback collection with microsurveys, seamless integration into user journeys, and data interpretation for insights.
• Userpilot’s webinar, “Simplifying Product Usage Analytics,” aims to make user data analytics understandable for all professionals.
• Gartner’s webinar focuses on the crucial role of generative AI in evolving AI service offerings, aimed at the PM team for understanding GenAI’s impact.
• ProductPlan and Chameleon’s training empowers product leaders to prioritize features and develop a more strategic product roadmap.
• Stanford’s webinar offers aspiring product managers practical strategies to enter the field, featuring insights from Silicon Valley executives.
• Akeneo’s webinar highlights how optimizing Product Experience (PX) can significantly enhance profitability, efficiency, and customer loyalty.
• PM280 Group’s webinar emphasizes the importance of a strong team culture in enhancing product management leadership and team success.
• Chameleon’s webinar with Janna Bastow highlights the deep significance of customer centricity in product leadership for organizational success.
• You can use your findings and improve your in-app marketing with Userpilot. Book the demo today!

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What is a product webinar?

A product webinar is a virtual seminar or presentation focused on showcasing and discussing a specific product. It’s a powerful marketing and sales tool that lets you see the product’s features, benefits, and digital transformation from your screen.

It helps you optimize your product strategy with the webinar’s insights, and make data-driven decisions.

8 Best product management webinars in 2024 and beyond

Discover the top 10 product management webinars in 2024 and beyond, each offering invaluable insights and product strategies to elevate your product game.

1. Userpilot’s webinar on collecting customer feedback with microsurveys

Watch the on-demand Userpilot webinar titled “5 Ways How to Use Microsurveys in Your SaaS.” This webinar is specially designed for SaaS product managers and UX designers looking to harness the power of microsurveys for collecting nuanced customer feedback efficiently.

You’ll learn:

• The strategic value in gathering customer feedback.
• How to integrate microsurveys seamlessly into the user journey.
• Techniques for interpreting microsurvey data to uncover actionable insights.

2. Userpilot’s on-demand webinar on user behavior analytics

Userpilot brings the complexities of Product Usage Analytics to the forefront with an on-demand webinar titled “Simplifying Product Usage Analytics.” This session, led by Yazan Sehwail, aims to demystify user data analytics, making it accessible for product management across all levels without the need for extensive data science knowledge.

You’ll learn:

• The importance of product usage analytics in tracking user behavior.
• Insights into identifying essential user and account attributes.
• Step-by-step guide on setting goals, measuring feature usage, and conducting funnel and cohort analyses for actionable insights.

3. Gartner’s webinar on the use of generative AI for product professionals

Gartner hosts a webinar on generative AI’s (GenAI) transformative impact on AI services in the coming years. Aimed at product management, the webinar provides insights on boosting sales and adoption with GenAI use cases.

You’ll learn:

• The most impactful GenAI applications and AI capabilities.
• How various industries embrace AI services, guiding product leaders on where to focus their efforts.
• How integrating AI services and solutions can address customer needs and drive significant business outcomes.

4. ProductPlan’s training on prioritizing features and creating a strategic product roadmap

ProductPlan and Chameleon present crucial training for product management on feature prioritization and roadmap strategy. This session tackles the balance between stakeholder demands and customer needs. Focusing on customer-centric decisions and feedback mechanisms, it aims to boost market performance and address customer issues more efficiently.

You’ll learn:

• The best practices for gathering reliable user feedback and executive gate reviews to inform your product decisions.
• Strategies for building feedback loops that align with strategic goals, ensuring product development is responsive to user needs.
• There are three key methods every Product Manager should know to prioritize features effectively.

5. Stanford’s webinar on starting a career as a product manager

Stanford University hosts a key webinar for aspiring digital product management, following previous webinar success.

With insights from Silicon Valley executives Jiaona Zhang and Anand Subramani, this session is ideal for those considering or trying to enter the field. The webinar provides crucial advice on understanding the role, skill development, and interview preparation, building upon the foundation laid in the previous session.

You’ll learn:

• To analyze the scope of a product manager’s responsibilities and determine if it’s the right career path for you.
• Actionable steps to acquire the skills needed to enter the field of product management.
• Common product management interview questions and how to stand out in hiring.

6. Akaneo’s webinar on designing product experiences that drive commercial goals

Akeneo presents a webinar on the crucial role of Product Experience (PX) in commercial success. This session explores PX—the strategy of aligning product presentation with customer preferences and sales channels.

Attendees will learn how effective PX strategies boost profitability, reduce costs, and enhance customer relationships, ultimately fostering acquisition, conversion, and loyalty.

You’ll learn:

• Effective PX strategies that can directly contribute to higher sales margins and profitability.
• How optimizing product experiences can reduce costs associated with customer acquisition, service, and retention.
• The role of PX improve customer acquisition rates and conversion ratios and foster long-term loyalty.

7. PM280 Group’s webinar on building a winning product team

PM280 Group offers a webinar to help the strategic product team, new and experienced, with the challenges of leading a product management team.

It covers developing customer-centric products, aligning with corporate goals, coaching teams, and managing stakeholder expectations. The focus is on the importance of team culture in overcoming these challenges.

You’ll learn:

• The multifaceted role of a product manager in guiding product teams to meet customer needs and achieve business goals.
• Establishing a strong team culture can serve as the foundation for team success, making leadership more effective and inclusive.
• Practical advice on creating a team culture that encourages collaboration, innovation, and shared responsibility.

8. Chameleon’s webinar on becoming customer-centric as a product leader

Chameleon hosts a webinar on customer centricity in product leadership, featuring a conversation with ProdPad’s CEO, Janna Bastow, led by Chameleon’s CEO, Pulkit Agrawal.

The session explores deep customer centricity, highlighting leaders’ roles in fostering a customer-focused culture, setting processes, and defining success based on customer feedback and needs.

You’ll learn:

• Strategies for identifying and hiring individuals to contribute to a customer-focused business environment.
• Insights on fostering an organizational culture prioritizing customer needs and perspectives across all departments.
• How to establish internal processes that effectively utilize customer feedback for prioritization and roadmap planning.

Conclusion

These product management webinars are ones that you can’t miss. So add them to your diary now so you don’t miss out on future webinars, trending topics, and education to help your product succeed and learn what you need to know about product marketing.

You can use your findings and improve your in-app marketing with Userpilot. Book the demo today!

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Product positioning strategies are not only a marketing tactic but a survival strategy.

So how do you ensure that your product not only lives but actually thrives?

In this article, we’ll go over product positioning definitions and their types, then go over our process for creating a product positioning strategy that gets positive user feedback.

TL;DR

• Product positioning is about defining your product’s place in the market to attract customers and enhance brand identity.
• There are different types of product positioning depending on your company’s strengths:

1. Characteristics-based positioning which focuses on unique product features.
2. Pricing-based positioning which emphasizes competitive pricing.
3. Use or application-based positioning which associates the product with specific use cases or JTBDs.
4. Quality or prestige-based positioning which targets a luxury or high-quality market segment to position the brand as exclusive.
5. Competitor-based positioning which focuses on pointing out the product’s advantages over its competitors.

• As for creating a brand positioning strategy, there are some steps you need to follow:

1. Identify your target market and create a detailed customer persona.
2. Conduct deep market research through surveys and interviews to understand customer preferences and market trends.
3. Define your product’s unique selling point (USP) that addresses target market needs.
4. Create a clear product positioning statement that focuses on your target audience, your product’s unique value, its differentiation, and the key benefits it delivers.
5. Test and refine the positioning based on customer feedback and key metrics.

• Now, let’s see some examples of effective product positioning from other SaaS companies:

1. Userpilot positions itself as a product for mid-market companies, and its pricing is designed with a no-discount policy that puts it as a premium solution
2. Monday.com leverages its product’s versatility to communicate its many use cases, positioning it as a top project management platform.
3. Coda employs competitor-based positioning by comparing itself against tools like Google Docs and Notion.

• Want to streamline and automate product management tasks to focus on important positioning strategies? Book a Userpilot demo to see how you can improve your product success.

What is product positioning?

Product positioning is a strategy that defines where and how your product stands in the market in order to bring more customers and improve your brand’s reputation. It shapes how customers perceive your product, focusing on its unique features and benefits to differentiate it from competitors.

Why are product positioning strategies important?

Product positioning strategies play a crucial role in not just attracting customers, but in building a loyal user base for your SaaS product. And for many reasons:

• They help set your product apart from competitors, promoting unique ideas or frameworks that differ from even bigger players in the market.
• Effective positioning ensures your product aligns with the needs and preferences of your target audience. This helps cultivate deeper engagement as they resonate more with the product.
• A well-positioned brand can help customers make informed purchasing choices. This is by clearly communicating the value of their product and reviewing its alternatives using its authority.

Types of product positioning strategies

Product positioning can take many forms, each with its unique approach to connecting with the target audience.

That said, each of these strategies offers a distinct way to position your product in a way that caters to your customer’s needs and preferences:

Characteristics-based positioning

This approach emphasizes the unique features of your product. It’s all about creating a strong association in the customers’ minds between your product and its ease of use, efficiency, unique features, or innovation. And the goal is to position your product as the go-to solution for customers seeking those specific features.

So if your product specializes in cloud-based development tools. You could use characteristics-based positioning by highlighting the platform’s unique feature of real-time collaborative coding, setting you apart from competitors who offer traditional, isolated coding environments.

Pricing-based positioning

Pricing-based positioning focuses on offering your product at a competitive price point. This strategy works well for attracting budget-conscious customers or entering markets with cost as a key decision factor. The idea is to provide a high-quality product at a price that undercuts competitors and still offers great value to your target customers.

For instance, you could adopt a pricing-based positioning strategy by offering a full suite of tools at a price significantly lower than the market average, appealing to cost-conscious small business owners.

Use or application-based positioning

Use or application-based positioning involves associating your product with specific use cases or jobs-to-be-done. It works by demonstrating how your product fits perfectly into your ideal customer’s work routine and makes their life easier.

For example, let’s say your product is a healthcare management platform. You could position it by focusing on managing patient records efficiently, thus targeting healthcare providers who need streamlined patient management solutions.

Quality or prestige-based positioning

Quality or prestige-based positioning targets a more exclusive customer base. It works by positioning your product as a symbol of high quality, exclusivity, or luxury.

To pull it off, you need to make your product exclusive and desirable to those who value premium experiences and are willing to pay more for superior quality. This can involve high-end branding, high-touch service, and an emphasis on the superior aspects of the product.

For instance, if your product offers high-end cybersecurity services for large corporations. A quality-based positioning strategy could emphasize exceptional security features and bespoke services, catering exclusively to top-tier clients.

Competitor-based positioning

With competitor-based positioning, you focus on how your product outperforms or offers more than the competition.

It can involve making comparisons that highlight your product’s advantages over others in the market—either in terms of functionality, additional features, proactive customer support, or overall value.

For example, if your product is a video streaming platform for businesses, you could use competitor-based positioning by emphasizing its superior streaming quality and uptime compared to your competitors.

How to create a product positioning strategy?

Now, let’s go over each step to create a well-thought product positioning strategy for your SaaS business:

Identify your target market

First, define who your target customer is.

Creating a detailed customer persona involves understanding their demographics, behaviors, preferences, and pain points. This persona will help you identify specific needs and challenges so you can tailor your product development and marketing strategy according to them.

Moreover, you can also analyze the competition for your target market. This will help you identify gaps in the market and position your product to capitalize on these opportunities.

Conduct market research

Now, dig deeper into the research.

To find positioning opportunities, leverage surveys and interviews to gather valuable data directly from your current customers—as these will give you a clearer understanding of their preferences and expectations.

The same applies to market trends and competitor analysis, as they will help you understand how competitors position their products and identify areas where your product can stand out—while making sure you’re into up-to-date information.

Define your product’s unique selling point (USP)

Your unique selling point (or unique value proposition) is central to your positioning.

Ask yourself:

• What’s your market position?
• What makes your product different and better than the competition?
• What are the unique features, benefits, or experiences your product offers that are not available elsewhere?
• How does your audience perceive your product?
• What are the aspects of your product that are more likely to influence purchase decisions?

Your USP should be compelling and directly address the needs and wants of your target market. It should combine your solution, your target audience, and the pain points/needs/JTBDs that you’re trying to address.

Create a clear product positioning statement

Next, craft a clear brand positioning statement that you can promote. This statement should include who your target audience is, the unique value your product offers, how it stands apart from competitors, and the key benefits it delivers.

For example, “Mailchimp empowers small businesses with an all-in-one marketing platform, offering innovative technology, award-winning support, and inspiring content.”

This statement will guide all your marketing efforts and ensure consistency across different channels. A well-crafted positioning statement should make anyone instantly grasp what your product is about and why it’s relevant to its users.

Test your product positioning and refine

So, testing your product positioning in the market is essential. It doesn’t matter how well-educated and elaborated your positioning strategy is if it doesn’t work.

For this, use customer feedback and key performance metrics, like customer satisfaction and market share to evaluate the effectiveness of your positioning. This data will provide insights into what’s working and what needs adjustment.

With feedback analysis, you can regularly refine your brand positioning to adapt to market trends, shifts in customer preferences, and new strategies from competitors.

This approach will provide enough agility to your company to ensure that your product remains relevant and continues to resonate with your target audience over time.

Examples of good product positioning

It can be complicated to put product positioning theory into practice.

For that reason, let’s see some real-world examples of SaaS companies that have excelled in positioning their products effectively:

Userpilot

Userpilot targets medium and enterprise companies, so we tailor all marketing materials to product teams rather than startups or SaaS founders (ensuring that our messaging resonates strongly with product managers or customer success reps).

As for our pricing positioning, Userpilot maintains a no-discounts policy and offers only annual pricing for Growth & Enterprise plans. This approach positions Userpilot as a premium solution, making the product less accessible to small businesses but perfectly suited for the mid-market sector.

Monday

Monday.com is a great example of use and application-based positioning. Their tagline, “Run any workflow with the product suite built for any business need you have in mind,” highlights the versatility and adaptability of their product.

By focusing on the various uses and applications of their platform, they effectively communicate the product’s value to a wide range of potential customers, from small businesses to large enterprises.

Coda

Coda is a good example of a competitor-based positioning strategy. They distinguish themselves by highlighting the benefits and competitive advantages they offer over other project management and document collaboration tools such as Google Docs or Airtable.

This approach not only showcases Coda’s unique features but also educates the audience about why they might be a better choice than their more established competitors.

Conclusion

Your SaaS can die or thrive depending on your product positioning strategy.

By identifying your target market, conducting thorough research, defining a unique selling point, and continuously refining your approach, you can give your business a higher chance to stand out in your market.

Want to streamline and automate product management tasks to focus on important positioning strategies? Book a Userpilot demo to see how you can improve your product success.

The post Product Positioning Strategies For SaaS: Types and Examples appeared first on ProdSens.live.

Are you thinking of a career in product management and wondering what the product manager career path looks like?

That’s what our guide explores, so you’re in the right place.

In particular, we look at:

• What the product manager’s role involves
• Their main responsibilities
• Common product management positions
• Tips on how to advance your PM career

Let’s dive in.

TL;DR

• A product manager leads the product management team and is responsible for overseeing all stages of the product development process.
• Typically, product managers are responsible for market and user research, product discovery, feature prioritization, and roadmapping. They also manage the product launch and track product performance throughout its lifecycle.
• Product managers are relatively well-paid. They earn more than developers, astronauts, and even attorneys, but less than surgeons.
• A degree in business, marketing, computer science, engineering, and data science can give you the foundation for a typical career path in product management.
• However, experience is much more important to succeed as a PM. Many product leaders have a background in development, marketing, sales, customer support, UX design, and data management.
• The Associate Product Manager position is an entry-level role responsible for smaller projects and supporting more senior colleagues. In the US, they earn on average around $103k per year.
• The Product Manager is next on the ladder. They have more responsibilities and independence in setting strategy and making product decisions. They earn around $156k per annum.
• Senior Product Managers are in charge of strategic decisions – they set the long-term product vision and strategy. They earn around $201k/year.
• The Director of Product is accountable for multiple product lines and manages product management teams. The average salary of a product director in the US is around $268k.
• The Vice-President of Product is a part of the senior leadership team and they are responsible for the overall product strategy and vision across the entire business. On average, they make $331k a year.
• The Chief Product Officer is the most senior role in charge of the entire product management function. In the States, average CPO salaries oscillate around $377k.
• To see how Userpilot can help you advance your PM career, book the demo!

What is a product manager?

A product manager is a multidisciplinary role that involves overseeing all aspects of the product management process, from market research and discovery, through product ideation, launch, and beyond.

The main goal of the product manager is to build products that fill a market gap, satisfy user needs and wants, and drive business goals.

What are the typical responsibilities in product management?

The product manager job description includes a myriad of responsibilities at all stages of the product lifecycle.

Their work begins with customer and market research to identify opportunities, like customer problems, needs, and desires that other products don’t address.

An important part of the process is also prioritization of the opportunities to choose the ones that will have the biggest impact on customer experience and product success.

Next, they lead the product team during the ideation stage. That’s when they work on the best solutions to the opportunities. Their job is not only to generate ideas but also to validate them before they go into development.

After that, product managers create the roadmap with all key outcomes, milestones, and timelines. This involves defining the product releases.

When the product or feature is launched (under their supervision), they track its performance by analyzing user behavior and collecting customer feedback. This is to identify further opportunities to add value to the product and improve user experience.

Performing all these responsibilities requires collaboration with cross-functional teams made up of engineers, marketers, sales reps, and customer success managers, to name just a few.

Is product management a high-paying job?

Product managers are fairly well-paid.

According to Glassdoor, product managers in the United States make an average of $156k. The pay falls between $97k and $162k.

To give you some context:

• Circus performers in the US make, on average, $51k a year
• Content writers or fishermen- $62k
• Pastors – $73k
• Full stack developers – $112k
• Astronauts – $138k
• Attorneys – around $146k, and
• Surgeons – $266k.

How to get started with a product management career?

As product manager is a multifaceted role, there’s no single way to start a career as a PM.

However, having the right education and experience can help you land your first PM job.

Get relevant education

To become a product manager, various educational paths can be beneficial, often depending on the industry and specific company.

A degree in business administration and management will provide a strong foundation for the role as it helps you develop strategic thinking, organizational skills, and an understanding of business principles.

As product management often involves understanding market needs and positioning products effectively, a background in marketing is highly valuable.

Lots of successful product managers in SaaS hold degrees in computer science and engineering. Technical background can help you understand the product development process and communicate with the engineering teams effectively. It can also help you progress into a specialist role, like the technical product manager.

Finally, a degree in data analysis or statistics could be truly beneficial as PMs need to be able to analyze performance data and make data-driven decisions.

Is it worth doing a product manager course?

There are a few good ones around but the overall consensus is that to succeed as a product manager, you need practical experience more than theoretical knowledge.

Acquire experience in a related field

So what experience can help you land your first PM gig?

Here are a few possible avenues to explore:

• Project management – experience in managing projects, especially those involving cross-functional teams, helps in understanding how to plan, execute, and deliver product initiatives.
• Technical roles – for those aiming to work in tech companies, experience in software development, engineering, or IT can provide a deep understanding of the technical challenges and processes involved in product development.
• Marketing and market research – understanding customer needs and market trends is a core part of product management.
• Sales and customer service – direct interaction with customers through sales or customer service roles can provide insights into customer needs, pain points, and preferences. This is invaluable when building customer-centric products.
• Data and business analysis – experience in analyzing data to derive business insights and a knack for understanding business needs can be crucial for developing solutions that drive business goals.
• UX Design – experience in UX design can be beneficial, particularly for product managers focusing on consumer-facing products.
• Industry-specific experience – depending on the industry (like healthcare, finance, retail, etc.), having experience in that specific sector can be advantageous, as it provides an understanding of the unique challenges and opportunities in that market.

Common product management positions

Let’s have a look at what a product manager’s career path might look like, starting from most junior roles.

1. Associate Product Manager (APM)

An associate product manager, or a junior product manager, is an entry-level product manager job for those starting in product management.

What does an associate product manager do?

Associate Product Managers (APMs) handle smaller projects or contribute to larger ones, working under experienced product managers.

They focus on understanding customer needs, analyzing market trends, and aiding in the development and improvement of product features.

Their responsibilities extend to collaborating with engineering, design, and marketing teams, ensuring product features align with user expectations and business goals. APMs also track and report on product performance, providing insights into successes and areas for improvement.

This role serves as a foundational step, equipping APMs with essential skills for career progression in product management.

Average salary of associate product managers

On average, a US-based associate product manager makes $103k per annum. On top of that, they can count on average additional cash compensation in the region of $10k.

2. Product Manager

A product manager is normally the next stage in the PM career.

What does a product manager do?

A step above the APM, product managers have more responsibility and autonomy.

Their role encompasses overseeing the development and management of a product or product line.

Key PM responsibilities include setting strategic direction, defining product roadmaps, and prioritizing features.

They collaborate closely with engineering, sales, marketing, and support teams to align product development with company goals.

As central decision-makers, PMs are accountable for their product’s success or failure, playing a crucial role in steering the product’s direction and ensuring it meets market and customer needs effectively.

Average product manager salary

As mentioned, PMs in the US make $156k on average.

This is normally made up of a base salary that falls somewhere between $97 and $162k, and additional cash compensation of $31k on average.

3. Senior Product Manager

The senior product manager role comes next in the PM pecking order.

What does a senior product manager do?

Senior product managers oversee complex products or extensive portfolios.

With greater experience, most senior product managers tackle strategic product decisions and often mentor junior product managers.

Their role is deeply involved in shaping the long-term vision and strategy for products, driving their development, and aligning them with overarching business objectives.

Senior PMs play a key role in ensuring products not only meet market demands but also contribute significantly to the company’s strategic goals, which is why they often prioritize key initiatives.

Average salary of senior product managers

Average senior product manager salaries oscillate around $201k. This usually includes additional cash compensation of around $49k on top of their base salaries of $128-182k a year.

4. Director of Product

Directors of Product have a strategic role with a broader scope of responsibilities than individual product managers.

What does a director of product do?

The Director of Product normally oversees multiple product lines and leads teams of product managers, providing leadership and direction.

Their key responsibilities include setting and executing the overall product strategy and playing a crucial role in aligning product development with the company’s larger strategic goals.

They often spearhead cross-functional initiatives, collaborating with various departments such as marketing, sales, engineering, and customer service. This cross-departmental collaboration is vital in driving product success and achieving business targets.

Their influence significantly impacts the direction and success of the business, making them key figures in shaping the company’s product landscape and market positioning.

Average salary of a director of product

With increased responsibility, come higher earnings.

The Glassdoor data shows that the average salary for a Director of Product is over $268k in the States. They can count on a base salary of $155-220k per annum and an extra $62-117k in additional cash compensation (on average).

5. VP of Product

The Vice President of Product is a senior executive role on the company’s leadership team.

What does a VP of product do?

As senior leaders, Vice Presidents of Product are responsible for the overall performance and outcomes of the product organization and are instrumental in shaping the product direction, ensuring it aligns with the broader goals of the company.

They are key in guiding the development, launch, and continuous improvement of products, ensuring each step aligns with the organization’s vision and market needs.

The VP role is not just managerial but also visionary: they have to anticipate market trends, identify new opportunities, and steer the product roadmap to keep the company at the forefront of its industry.

Average salary of a VP of product

According to Glassdoor, a VP of Product can make around $70k more than a director.

The average salary for the role in the US is $331,301 a year. VPs can also make up to $194k in bonuses and extra cash compensation.

6. Chief Product Officer

The Chief Product Officer, or CPO, is the highest product management executive in a company.

What does a chief product officer do?

CPOs are responsible for the entire product management function, including strategy, design, development, and marketing.

The CPO drives the organization’s product vision, oversees the development of new products, and ensures that existing products meet the needs of customers.

This role is critical for companies where product innovation and strategy are key to the business. The CPO works closely with the CEO and other C-level executives to align product strategies with the company’s overall goals and objectives.

Average salary of a CPO

Considering how much responsibility sits on their shoulders, it’s no surprise chief product officers are paid handsomely.

A CPO at a US-based company earns, on average, $377k. This consists of a base salary ranging from $160k and $293k a year and additional compensation of $122-229k.

Tips for a successful product management career path

Let’s wrap up with a handful of tips that will help you accelerate your product management career.

Hone both hard and soft skills

As a product manager, you require diverse skills.

Important product management skills include hard skills, such as data analysis, prioritization, or roadmapping, and soft skills, like leadership, empathy, and communication skills.

Work with your superiors and mentors to reflect on your strengths and weaknesses, and identify opportunities to fill skill gaps.

Develop the right mindset

To succeed as a PM, you need to right mindset.

For example, product managers are efficient problem-solvers who see every challenge as an opportunity to grow.

This requires adaptability and resilience. You need to be prepared to adjust your strategies in response to changing market needs and technological developments.

Build your network

Networking with other product managers and professionals in your industry can provide valuable insights, mentorship opportunities, and career advancement possibilities.

For starters, reach out to other product professionals in your company. Use LinkedIn to connect with product managers, consultants, and coaches, and join Slack communities. Also, consider joining Growth Mentor.

Invest in the right tool stack

Your job will be so much easier with the right tools.

You’re likely to need software for:

• Product roadmapping
• Project management
• Product analytics
• UX design and prototyping
• Communication and collaboration
• CRM
• Customer feedback
• User onboarding

Look for solutions that are user-friendly and intuitive to use, easy to integrate with other tools you’re already using, and offer enough functionality to help you achieve your objectives.

For example, Userpilot is a no-code product growth platform with advanced analytics and feedback features that allow non-technical users to create personalized onboarding experiences to drive product adoption and account expansion.

Conclusion

There isn’t one product manager career path.

That’s because product managers come from diverse backgrounds and have multiple directions to explore in their careers.

Apart from traditional vertical progression up the ladder, from the junior product manager up to CPO, there are also horizontal opportunities you could pursue. The demand for specialist roles, like technical or AI product managers is increasing.

If you want to see how Userpilot can help you boost your PM career opportunities, book the demo!

The post Product Manager Career Path: A Guide for Growing in Product Management appeared first on ProdSens.live.

Behind all of Google’s innovative products, technical product managers (TPM) at Google stand as the leaders who drive product delivery goals from conceptualization to launch. 

Even though becoming a technical product manager at Google is the dream job for many ambitious technical PMs, it is a challenging career.

Yet, it is a rewarding career path and an opportunity to formulate new ideas, work with talented engineers, and release innovative products to users worldwide.

Nonetheless, becoming one is far from easy. To succeed in this role, you need to have a strong technical background in Google products from Gmail to Google Cloud and possess the necessary product management skills.

Are you someone who is aiming to become a technical product manager at Google someday?

Then you have come to the right place to learn more. Keep reading to find out what a Google TPM does and the roles and responsibilities.

What Does a Google Technical PM do?

A technical PM at Google does similar job tasks as any other Google product manager. However, their job places more emphasis on the technical side of managing Google products as opposed to other areas of product management. 

Technical PMs at Google work on new technologies, products, platforms, and systems. Therefore, Google product managers need to know the basics of data structures and advanced engineering techniques used in their products and services. These include understanding concepts behind products such as:

• Google analytics
• Google FLOC
• Google Cloud Google Adsense

They provide technical consultation during the full product lifecycle throughout the conceptualization, product roadmap development, execution, and product launch using their strong technical background.

They work with teams like solution architects, engineers, designers, UX, and marketers to create cutting-edge digital products for customers. They also work with internal stakeholders to transform customer requirements into industry-leading innovative products. 

Interesting in becoming a technical product manager at Google? Consider taking our PMHQ Product Manager HQ Technical Product Manager Course to set you up for your dream job at Google.

Now let’s see the roles and responsibilities a technical PM at Google need to undertake and the skills you need to master to perform well in this role.

1. Product Roadmap Development

The main responsibility of a Google Technical PM is to drive product roadmap development for new products and features.

Credits: Roadmunk

They need to communicate and collaborate with stakeholders like the program manager, other technical product management teams, and non-technical product managers to provide their technical expertise in coming up with an achievable roadmap. 

Also, as innovation is a key part of Google, they need to develop new ideas and innovative solutions for customer problems and turn them into new products, which helps Google spread into new avenues and expand the userbase.

If higher management accepts these ideas, Google TPMs then develop a product strategy that includes product requirements, budgets, and resources. With it, they translate the product strategy into epics and user stories addressing specific business requirements.

2. Facilitating Collaboration Among Teams

The whole product lifecycle of any tech company involves communication and collaboration. A technical PM is responsible for managing different teams. Hence, they need to be team players who facilitate continuous collaboration among different teams across multiple functional areas.  

You need to collaborate with the engineering teams, UX designers, sales teams, Quality engineers, marketers, third-party teams, and other stakeholders to execute the product roadmap. 

Providing a prompt response is essential to building a strong relationship and trust among team members whenever they need feedback, opinions, or requirement clarifications.

This also includes continuous sync-up between teams, resolving any impediments teams face, and providing guidance to overcome challenges and ambiguous situations.

3. Research and Develop Solutions to Problems

Unlike a non-technical product manager, a technical PM must develop solutions to problems by providing their technical expertise to the teams involved.

When required, they must collaborate with stakeholders from different product areas, functions, and even across regions to help develop feasible solutions and implement them.  

Google as a tech giant in the IT industry, strives for innovation and has become the market leader in various digital products.

Therefore, research and development are critical areas they work on.

A TPM needs to research different areas using a proper research methodology to develop solutions and find new product development ideas.

Also, it is part of their ongoing learning and development activities that facilitate the growth mindset. Therefore, having strong problem-solving, research, and development skills are must-have skills for a technical PM to thrive in this position in the long term.

4. Market Research and Evaluation of Emerging Technologies

Another key responsibility of a technical PM at Google is carrying out market research. This is critical for several reasons:

• Key to understanding new market opportunities
• Important to discover market trends that affect your product’s success
• Crucial to determine your unique value proposition against competitor products

For market research, technical PMs at Google must conduct interviews, and surveys, collect customer feedback, and find out customer requirements. They need relevant statistics and analytical skills to interpret and derive important insights from the results.

Also, Google always keeps an eye on emerging technologies. Thus, as a technical PM, you need to keep up-to-date with the latest technological advancements in the industry and evaluate them to understand their potential impacts. 

This also includes analyzing technologies competitors like Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple use, which helps them improve their market position and compete with rival groups.

5. Product Testing and Training

Product review and testing are key responsibilities of a technical PM at Google before the product launch.  The iterative testing approach is important to understand the customer interests and identify the features that do not add value to them.

Also, technical PMs need to provide ideas, suggestions, and improvements for the test strategies devised by the testers for the products. 

They test the quality and performance of each new feature developed once available in a lower environment. Google offers volunteers worldwide to test their products and gather feedback from those tests.

Then technical PMs at Google work with other PMs to prioritize any bugs identified and provide improvements to the products based on customer feedback.

Become a Google Technical PM Today

Now that you have identified the roles and responsibilities of a Google Technical Product manager, you need to understand what skills you need to master to land this dream job position.

There is a range of technical, managerial, and soft skills you need to sharpen to perform the above-discussed duties of this role.

Building such a skill-set is not an overnight achievement. Rather one must work smarter identifying their skill gaps and working harder to fulfill those gaps. 

Our PMHQ courses in technical product management aid product professionals like you to jumpstart your career as a technical product manager at Google. Start building your skills, knowledge, and experience to land a job as a Google TPM today.

The post What Does a Google Technical Product Manager Do? appeared first on Product Manager HQ.

The post What Does a Google Technical Product Manager Do? appeared first on ProdSens.live.

Behind all of Google’s innovative products, technical product managers (TPM) at Google stand as the leaders who drive product delivery goals from conceptualization to launch. 

Even though becoming a technical product manager at Google is the dream job for many ambitious technical PMs, it is a challenging career.

Yet, it is a rewarding career path and an opportunity to formulate new ideas, work with talented engineers, and release innovative products to users worldwide.

Nonetheless, becoming one is far from easy. To succeed in this role, you need to have a strong technical background in Google products from Gmail to Google Cloud and possess the necessary product management skills.

Are you someone who is aiming to become a technical product manager at Google someday?

Then you have come to the right place to learn more. Keep reading to find out what a Google TPM does and the roles and responsibilities.

What Does a Google Technical PM do?

A technical PM at Google does similar job tasks as any other Google product manager. However, their job places more emphasis on the technical side of managing Google products as opposed to other areas of product management. 

Technical PMs at Google work on new technologies, products, platforms, and systems. Therefore, Google product managers need to know the basics of data structures and advanced engineering techniques used in their products and services. These include understanding concepts behind products such as:

• Google analytics
• Google FLOC
• Google Cloud Google Adsense

They provide technical consultation during the full product lifecycle throughout the conceptualization, product roadmap development, execution, and product launch using their strong technical background.

They work with teams like solution architects, engineers, designers, UX, and marketers to create cutting-edge digital products for customers. They also work with internal stakeholders to transform customer requirements into industry-leading innovative products. 

Interesting in becoming a technical product manager at Google? Consider taking our PMHQ Product Manager HQ Technical Product Manager Course to set you up for your dream job at Google.

Now let’s see the roles and responsibilities a technical PM at Google need to undertake and the skills you need to master to perform well in this role.

1. Product Roadmap Development

The main responsibility of a Google Technical PM is to drive product roadmap development for new products and features.

Credits: Roadmunk

They need to communicate and collaborate with stakeholders like the program manager, other technical product management teams, and non-technical product managers to provide their technical expertise in coming up with an achievable roadmap. 

Also, as innovation is a key part of Google, they need to develop new ideas and innovative solutions for customer problems and turn them into new products, which helps Google spread into new avenues and expand the userbase.

If higher management accepts these ideas, Google TPMs then develop a product strategy that includes product requirements, budgets, and resources. With it, they translate the product strategy into epics and user stories addressing specific business requirements.

2. Facilitating Collaboration Among Teams

The whole product lifecycle of any tech company involves communication and collaboration. A technical PM is responsible for managing different teams. Hence, they need to be team players who facilitate continuous collaboration among different teams across multiple functional areas.  

You need to collaborate with the engineering teams, UX designers, sales teams, Quality engineers, marketers, third-party teams, and other stakeholders to execute the product roadmap. 

Providing a prompt response is essential to building a strong relationship and trust among team members whenever they need feedback, opinions, or requirement clarifications.

This also includes continuous sync-up between teams, resolving any impediments teams face, and providing guidance to overcome challenges and ambiguous situations.

3. Research and Develop Solutions to Problems

Unlike a non-technical product manager, a technical PM must develop solutions to problems by providing their technical expertise to the teams involved.

When required, they must collaborate with stakeholders from different product areas, functions, and even across regions to help develop feasible solutions and implement them.  

Google as a tech giant in the IT industry, strives for innovation and has become the market leader in various digital products.

Therefore, research and development are critical areas they work on.

A TPM needs to research different areas using a proper research methodology to develop solutions and find new product development ideas.

Also, it is part of their ongoing learning and development activities that facilitate the growth mindset. Therefore, having strong problem-solving, research, and development skills are must-have skills for a technical PM to thrive in this position in the long term.

4. Market Research and Evaluation of Emerging Technologies

Another key responsibility of a technical PM at Google is carrying out market research. This is critical for several reasons:

• Key to understanding new market opportunities
• Important to discover market trends that affect your product’s success
• Crucial to determine your unique value proposition against competitor products

For market research, technical PMs at Google must conduct interviews, and surveys, collect customer feedback, and find out customer requirements. They need relevant statistics and analytical skills to interpret and derive important insights from the results.

Also, Google always keeps an eye on emerging technologies. Thus, as a technical PM, you need to keep up-to-date with the latest technological advancements in the industry and evaluate them to understand their potential impacts. 

This also includes analyzing technologies competitors like Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple use, which helps them improve their market position and compete with rival groups.

5. Product Testing and Training

Product review and testing are key responsibilities of a technical PM at Google before the product launch.  The iterative testing approach is important to understand the customer interests and identify the features that do not add value to them.

Also, technical PMs need to provide ideas, suggestions, and improvements for the test strategies devised by the testers for the products. 

They test the quality and performance of each new feature developed once available in a lower environment. Google offers volunteers worldwide to test their products and gather feedback from those tests.

Then technical PMs at Google work with other PMs to prioritize any bugs identified and provide improvements to the products based on customer feedback.

Become a Google Technical PM Today

Now that you have identified the roles and responsibilities of a Google Technical Product manager, you need to understand what skills you need to master to land this dream job position.

There is a range of technical, managerial, and soft skills you need to sharpen to perform the above-discussed duties of this role.

Building such a skill-set is not an overnight achievement. Rather one must work smarter identifying their skill gaps and working harder to fulfill those gaps. 

Our PMHQ courses in technical product management aid product professionals like you to jumpstart your career as a technical product manager at Google. Start building your skills, knowledge, and experience to land a job as a Google TPM today.

Josh Fechter

Josh Fechter is the co-founder of Product Manager HQ, founder of Technical Writer HQ, and founder and head of product of Squibler. You can connect with him on LinkedIn here.

The post What Does a Google Technical Product Manager Do? appeared first on Product Manager HQ.

The post What Does a Google Technical Product Manager Do? appeared first on ProdSens.live.

Behind all of Google’s innovative products, technical product managers (TPM) at Google stand as the leaders who drive product delivery goals from conceptualization to launch. 

Even though becoming a technical product manager at Google is the dream job for many ambitious technical PMs, it is a challenging career.

Yet, it is a rewarding career path and an opportunity to formulate new ideas, work with talented engineers, and release innovative products to users worldwide.

Nonetheless, becoming one is far from easy. To succeed in this role, you need to have a strong technical background in Google products from Gmail to Google Cloud and possess the necessary product management skills.

Are you someone who is aiming to become a technical product manager at Google someday?

Then you have come to the right place to learn more. Keep reading to find out what a Google TPM does and the roles and responsibilities.

What Does a Google Technical PM do?

A technical PM at Google does similar job tasks as any other Google product manager. However, their job places more emphasis on the technical side of managing Google products as opposed to other areas of product management. 

Technical PMs at Google work on new technologies, products, platforms, and systems. Therefore, Google product managers need to know the basics of data structures and advanced engineering techniques used in their products and services. These include understanding concepts behind products such as:

• Google analytics
• Google FLOC
• Google Cloud Google Adsense

They provide technical consultation during the full product lifecycle throughout the conceptualization, product roadmap development, execution, and product launch using their strong technical background.

They work with teams like solution architects, engineers, designers, UX, and marketers to create cutting-edge digital products for customers. They also work with internal stakeholders to transform customer requirements into industry-leading innovative products. 

Interesting in becoming a technical product manager at Google? Consider taking our PMHQ Product Manager HQ Technical Product Manager Course to set you up for your dream job at Google.

Now let’s see the roles and responsibilities a technical PM at Google need to undertake and the skills you need to master to perform well in this role.

1. Product Roadmap Development

The main responsibility of a Google Technical PM is to drive product roadmap development for new products and features.

Credits: Roadmunk

They need to communicate and collaborate with stakeholders like the program manager, other technical product management teams, and non-technical product managers to provide their technical expertise in coming up with an achievable roadmap. 

Also, as innovation is a key part of Google, they need to develop new ideas and innovative solutions for customer problems and turn them into new products, which helps Google spread into new avenues and expand the userbase.

If higher management accepts these ideas, Google TPMs then develop a product strategy that includes product requirements, budgets, and resources. With it, they translate the product strategy into epics and user stories addressing specific business requirements.

2. Facilitating Collaboration Among Teams

The whole product lifecycle of any tech company involves communication and collaboration. A technical PM is responsible for managing different teams. Hence, they need to be team players who facilitate continuous collaboration among different teams across multiple functional areas.  

You need to collaborate with the engineering teams, UX designers, sales teams, Quality engineers, marketers, third-party teams, and other stakeholders to execute the product roadmap. 

Providing a prompt response is essential to building a strong relationship and trust among team members whenever they need feedback, opinions, or requirement clarifications.

This also includes continuous sync-up between teams, resolving any impediments teams face, and providing guidance to overcome challenges and ambiguous situations.

3. Research and Develop Solutions to Problems

Unlike a non-technical product manager, a technical PM must develop solutions to problems by providing their technical expertise to the teams involved.

When required, they must collaborate with stakeholders from different product areas, functions, and even across regions to help develop feasible solutions and implement them.  

Google as a tech giant in the IT industry, strives for innovation and has become the market leader in various digital products.

Therefore, research and development are critical areas they work on.

A TPM needs to research different areas using a proper research methodology to develop solutions and find new product development ideas.

Also, it is part of their ongoing learning and development activities that facilitate the growth mindset. Therefore, having strong problem-solving, research, and development skills are must-have skills for a technical PM to thrive in this position in the long term.

4. Market Research and Evaluation of Emerging Technologies

Another key responsibility of a technical PM at Google is carrying out market research. This is critical for several reasons:

• Key to understanding new market opportunities
• Important to discover market trends that affect your product’s success
• Crucial to determine your unique value proposition against competitor products

For market research, technical PMs at Google must conduct interviews, and surveys, collect customer feedback, and find out customer requirements. They need relevant statistics and analytical skills to interpret and derive important insights from the results.

Also, Google always keeps an eye on emerging technologies. Thus, as a technical PM, you need to keep up-to-date with the latest technological advancements in the industry and evaluate them to understand their potential impacts. 

This also includes analyzing technologies competitors like Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple use, which helps them improve their market position and compete with rival groups.

5. Product Testing and Training

Product review and testing are key responsibilities of a technical PM at Google before the product launch.  The iterative testing approach is important to understand the customer interests and identify the features that do not add value to them.

Also, technical PMs need to provide ideas, suggestions, and improvements for the test strategies devised by the testers for the products. 

They test the quality and performance of each new feature developed once available in a lower environment. Google offers volunteers worldwide to test their products and gather feedback from those tests.

Then technical PMs at Google work with other PMs to prioritize any bugs identified and provide improvements to the products based on customer feedback.

Become a Google Technical PM Today

Now that you have identified the roles and responsibilities of a Google Technical Product manager, you need to understand what skills you need to master to land this dream job position.

There is a range of technical, managerial, and soft skills you need to sharpen to perform the above-discussed duties of this role.

Building such a skill-set is not an overnight achievement. Rather one must work smarter identifying their skill gaps and working harder to fulfill those gaps. 

Our PMHQ courses in technical product management aid product professionals like you to jumpstart your career as a technical product manager at Google. Start building your skills, knowledge, and experience to land a job as a Google TPM today.

The post What Does a Google Technical Product Manager Do? appeared first on Product Manager HQ.

The post What Does a Google Technical Product Manager Do? appeared first on ProdSens.live.