8 Powerful Free Tools No Product Manager Should Be Without

A product manager’s job is never easy. You’re constantly juggling multiple responsibilities – understanding customer needs, defining product strategy, prioritizing features, coordinating with engineers, marketing teams, sales teams, and more. Having the right tools can make a massive difference in helping you stay organized, efficient, and insightful as you navigate the chaotic world of product management tools. 

Luckily, there are some fantastic free tools out there that every PM should have in their toolbox. Here are 8 of the most powerful free tools that no product manager should be without:

1. Google Analytics

Let’s start with the obvious. Google Analytics is hands-down one of the most valuable free tools for gathering insight on your customers. With Google Analytics, you can track key metrics like:

– Traffic sources – See where your website visitors are coming from (organic search, social media, referrals, etc). This helps you identify your most effective marketing channels.

– Landing pages – Find out which pages on your site attract the most traffic. Use this to double down on popular content. 

– Bounce rate – See which pages make visitors leave quickly. High bounce rates indicate confusing/unappealing pages.

– Conversion rates – Track how many visitors convert into customers. Monitor this number to gauge the effectiveness of your product and marketing.

As a PM, you should obsessively analyze Google Analytics to understand how customers interact with your product. It provides invaluable data to inform your priorities and decisions.

2. Chisel

• Roadmap Management: Chisel allows PMs to create and maintain product roadmaps centrally. Teams can collaborate on prioritizing features, set target milestone dates, and track progress.
• Customer Feedback: The platform integrates tools to gather customer input, like surveys, interviews, and support requests. Feedback can be tagged and searched to inform roadmap decisions.
• Align Internal Teams: Chisel provides visibility into the roadmap across engineering, marketing, sales, and other teams. A shared view helps align priorities and resources toward strategic goals.
• Visualize Product Strategy: PMs can model their target customer segments, competitive landscape, and desired outcomes in Chisel. Dashboards visualize progress against strategic KPIs.
• Automated Reporting: Key metrics like feedback trends, roadmap progress, feature usage, and more are automatically reported to stakeholders.

Chisel aims to improve visibility, streamline collaboration, and provide the data-driven insights needed to deliver great products by bringing all critical PM workflows into a single integrated system. With the proper execution, it could become an indispensable platform for modern product organizations.

3. Google Alerts 

Google Alerts makes it easy to monitor the web for relevant news and discussions related to your product and industry. After setting up alerts for your chosen keywords, Google will email you whenever new results match your search terms. 

This keeps you on top of news that may impact your product strategy. For example, you could get alerts for:

– Your product name – See reviews and announcements as they’re published.

– Competitor product names – Keep tabs on competitors’ new releases, news, and promotions. 

– Industry terms – Stay on top of industry trends, technologies, and developments.

– Feature names – Track discussions and feedback around your product’s key features.

Google Alerts help you avoid messy manual searching to stay effortlessly informed. The insights uncovered from alerts often lead to ideas for new features, marketing campaigns, strategic partnerships, and more.

4. Reddit

Reddit is an online goldmine for discovering what real people think about your industry, competitors, product features, etc. With over 130,000 active subreddits, you can tap into highly engaged niche communities relevant to your product. 

Search for your product name – you may uncover valuable user feedback and impressions. Beyond that, explore related subreddits like:

– r/startups – Discussions about building and launching new products.

– r/entrepreneur – Conversations around product management, marketing, and more.

– r/SaaS – Insights on the software/SaaS industry.

– r/ProductManagement – Advice and tips for fellow PMs. 

Reddit is the perfect channel for getting brutally honest opinions from real users. Let it inform your product development cycles and marketing campaigns. The site lets you join the conversation and interact with your target customers.

5. Slack Community Groups

Slack has become the default community platform for all kinds of professionals. Within Slack, you can find free groups related to product management, SaaS, growth marketing, UX design, and more. 

Joining a few choice Slack groups provides access to the wisdom of thousands of intelligent peers in your industry. You can browse channels for ideas, ask questions, or participate in vibrant discussions. Some great Slack groups include:

– Product School – An enormous community of product managers.

– Growth Hackers – Expert conversations on startup growth strategies. 

– MakerPad – Advice on building successful products and teams.

– Product Coalition – Helpful community of product leaders.

– UX Collective – Group for UX designers and researchers.

The connections and knowledge gained from these groups provide endless value. Slack communities often become a trusted resource for advice and staying current with industry trends.

6. Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is a free tool for uncovering the most shared content around any topic. Just enter a search term, and Buzzsumo analyzes millions of articles to show you the ones with the most social shares. 

The logic here is that the more shares an article has, the better it likely resonates with your target audience. Buzzsumo surfaces content ideas that you can model after or build on when creating your website pages, blog posts, guides, and other marketing material.

For example, you could use Buzzsumo to find the most shared:

– Blog posts about your product category

– Articles mentioning your competitors 

– Stories related to your target customer’s interests

Studying this viral content reveals what people naturally gravitate towards. Apply these learnings to craft compelling content optimized for your own audience.

7. Mailshake 

Mailshake is designed to help you conduct effective sales and marketing outreach over email. It makes the entire outreach process easier through features like:

– Email templates – Professionally-written email copy you can customize.

– Email verification – Ensure you have valid contact emails.

– Lead enrichment – Append extra contact details to leads.

– Email sequencing – Automatically follow up with each contact.

– Read receipts – See who opened your email vs. ignored it.

This tool removes the pain of one of the least glamorous but most important parts of any PM’s job – outbound communication. The time savings add up, and the provided templates increase your odds of getting responses from prospects and leads.

8. Trello

Lastly, Trello is one of the best free project management tools. Its kanban-style boards allow you to organize and break projects into manageable tasks. At a glance, you can: 

– Create project boards for product features, releases, marketing campaigns, etc.

– Add cards to represent individual tasks under each project.

– Assign tasks to team members and track who is responsible for what.  

– Set due dates to keep everyone on schedule. 

– Move cards from “To-do” to “In progress” to “Complete” as work gets done.

Trello brings much-needed order and clarity to product development. The intuitive drag-and-drop interface makes light work of task management. Trello helps you wrangle cross-functional product teams and ensure nothing falls through the cracks.

Power Up Your Product Management

Mastering product management today means juggling a dizzying array of responsibilities from start to finish. The right tools can provide the efficiency boosts and strategic insights needed to avoid being overwhelmed.

Google Analytics, Chisel, Google Alerts, Reddit, Slack groups, Buzzsumo, Mailshake, and Trello are just a few of the free but mighty tools every PM should take advantage of. Embrace these tools and watch your product efforts reach new heights.

Product management is fiercely competitive, but refusing to arm yourself with the best tools is like entering a gunfight empty-handed. So start filling your tool belt and set yourself up for product success today!