Product Management tools

Online product management field is technology intensive. There are numerous tools available in the market which can help product manager in effectively managing the products. Based on my experience and usage, I will try to list down various tools which can be used by product managers. The tools can be basically grouped into various categories based on the problem it solves

Understanding user behavior

1.      A/B testing

One of the most effective way of understanding user behavior on the site/APP is to do A/B testing. It is basically about developing multiple version of a feature and showing each version to a different set of user to identify which version is working better. There are goals which can be defined for the A/B testing based on what that features objective is.These goals then can be tested for each of the variation and whichever variation performs better than other can be picked for final development. There are numerous A/B testing tool available in market. The tools which are famous are

·         Optimizely: It has both paid and free version. One can test up to 1 lakh user for free in this tool. One can try out this tool at https://www.optimizely.com/

·         VWO: It also has both paid and free version. One can test comparatively less number of users for free in this tool. The tool can be accessed at https://vwo.com/

·         Google’s experiment: It is part of google analytics which allows to do A/B testing on various features pages

     2.       Heat Maps:

The heat maps is basically a click map where you can know where on the site/mobile user is clicking. Heat maps helps in understanding which elements are more valuable to the user and so the interface can be rearranged as per user behavior. The heat maps also helps in identifying the elements which are not used at all and thus can be removed from the site. Some of the famous tools are

Crazy egg: This has paid version as well as free version. Free version is available for one month. It can be accessed at https://www.crazyegg.com/

Data Collection Analysis

In order to improve the product it is necessary to understand how your site is currently performing. This means that data for site needs to be collected and stored so that it can be analyzed as and when it is required.

There are numerous tools available which helps in analytics. The most famous ones are as below

1.  Google Analytics

This the most widely used analytics tools in online industry. This tool helps you in knowing everything about the site and identifying new product opportunities. It provides below functionality

• Page tracking: This helps in understanding how the various pages of your site is performing in terms of bounce rate, time spent, traffic composition etc…The google analytics code needs to be place on each page in order to access this data.
• Event tracking: This helps in understanding how many times a particular action is performed by the user for ex... How many time a button is clicked, how many times user fills a form etc…
• Channel grouping: This helps in organizing the traffic into various channels such as Organic, Paid, and Direct etc... There is default channel grouping available which can be used for this
• Content grouping: The various pages on your site can be grouped together based on the content of the pages.

      2. Omniture

This is another tools which is similar to google analytics. It is basically used by ecommerce companies to do data analysis.

Wireframe and Prototype

In order to develop any product first its prototype needs to be developed. There are numerous tools available in the market which allows creating wireframes .Below are some of the tools available in the market and I have used them

1.   Just in Mind

 It is one of the most widely used wireframe tools. It has free version as well as paid version. Once can design desktop wireframe as well as mobile wireframe using this tool. This tool can be accessed at www.justinmind.com/

2.  Balsamiq

This tools is very simple to use. It can be used to create basic desktop wireframe. It is not so much suitable for creating mobile wireframe. This tools also has free and paid version. It can be accessed at https://balsamiq.com/

3   3.    Mockflow

This tools is suitable for creating mobile mockups. It can be accessed at https://www.mockflow.com