Internal product management for enterprise tools

Written by Scott Judson scotthjudson. Are you considering a career in product management? You might wonder how to become a product manager. What do you study? What kind of experience do you need?

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Internal product management for enterprise tools

Content:

• Introduction to Product Management
• Top 10 Tools Used By Product Managers
• Internal Product Management
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• Lessons learned from managing internal products
• Applying product management to internal platforms

Introduction to Product Management

It's easy, as a PM, to get overwhelmed by the number of tools that are available to help you run your team, understand your users, improve your product, and complete all the other tasks that make up the typical workload of a product manager. You have better things to do than spend all day free trialing various tools for team communication.

That's why we put together this mega list of the most important and useful PM tools out there. Each section of this guide corresponds with a vital PM task, whether it's getting in touch with your customers or organizing the actual completion of your product or feature.

We've sought to explain just who each tool makes sense for and why. Not every tool we mention here is for everyone, but, if you read through this guide, it's likely that you'll find the right tool for you. As a product manager, communication is one of the most important aspects of your job. As a cross-functional team leader, effective communication keeps stakeholders informed and projects moving forward. As a result, you need tools that streamline your communication efforts and offer features that meet your specific needs.

For example, the communication needs of a startup with a small product team will be much different than the needs of a team at a large enterprise. Here are some of the best tools available for different team sizes to help with effective team communication. Ryver is the perfect tool if you manage a small team or need a free but comprehensive tool.

It's similar to Slack in that it houses all team communication in one place. It integrates across multiple platforms—mobile, web and desktop—to allow for easy use. Teams can stay in the loop regardless of individual locations or which devices they use. Never miss a thing with the added bonus of email notifications. Enable it for when you're logged out or working offline.

The app is really flexible and gives you the ability to create and add unlimited users, guests, teams, chats, posts, search, and data. HipChat is a great option for startups or small businesses. It's known for its ability to help teams manage and organize their chats among themselves. It also offers a video chat functionality for distributed teams that rely on video chats for meetings. To make it easier for you to work with the products you already rely on, HipChat integrates with over apps and services.

It offers two plans depending on the specific features you need. The Basic plan offers unlimited users, group chat, instant messaging, and file sharing.

The Plus plan offers the same, in addition to group video chat, group screen sharing, unlimited file sharing, storage, and message history. Probably the best-known team communication app on this list, Slack lets users organize public and private changes for projects. It offers both voice and video calls through public channels and DMs for easy project collaboration.

It's constantly working on and releasing updates to make the app more efficient. For instance, file sharing is as simple as drag and drop. With full integration with a variety of other tools, there isn't much need to leave the app for any of your communication and sharing needs. The free plan includes The Ultimate Product Manager Tool Stack limited message search capabilities, storage and integration, and two-person group calls.

Chat is completely open source with more than active contributors on GitHub. You can host your own instance of Rocket. Chat and, when you do so, it is completely free to use—no matter how many users or guests you add.

And if you like the look of Slack, you're in luck—it's essentially identical in appearance. If you don't want to deal with the hassle of setting up your own instance, you can opt to let Rocket. Chat manage and host your installation. Pricing is more generous than Slack's—you can get up to 50 concurrent users on a Rocket. If you think Slack has a lot to offer in the feature department, Bitrix24 goes a few steps beyond that.

First of all, it's perfect for teams that prefer a self-hosted solution. Every person on your team can personalize their Activity Stream dashboard to display what's most important to them. For example, they might choose to see messages or recently completed tasks. Their tagline, "Social network for business" is perfect because it feels like a social media channel.

In addition to general communication, team members can share photos and earn badges. Badges for a job well done are a great motivational tool to keep everyone motivated and on task. The app also offers document management, a calendar to help manage product roadmaps, an email service and a place to manage document collaboration. It offers four plans with the main difference being online storage capacity. Similar to Bitrix24, it's a social platform built for team communication.

It's fully customizable so you can adjust it to suit your specific needs. Three major areas within the app are collaboration, engagement, and productivity. Collaboration allows for easier communication and documentation between cross-functional teams. You're able to store and share documents. The engagement feature helps keep teams informed of product development and management.

The productivity feature acts as a knowledge hub for teams to store and share documents related to the product. Tettra is designed to be the central hub for all of your team's documentation like style guides, product specifications, and HR resources.

But what makes Tettra better than other storage solutions is its pure simplicity. Organizing, editing and finding content is straightforward, and the interface is clean and instantly understandable.

The logic is: with quick access to knowledge comes better team decisions in less time. When your team is clued up and can share knowledge in a snap, great things can happen. For example, with slash commands —e. Also, any updates your team makes in Tettra can trigger a notification that is delivered to your team in your Slack chat. This way Tettra fits nicely into your workflow, allowing for full transparency and fast access to knowledge.

Your customers are out there, but you have to find them and get their attention. And, of course, this is not easy. But the tools you use to communicate with them can really make a difference. Finding a tool that lets you learn from the data and respond to it appropriately will make your campaigns much stronger and more effective. Email campaigns are one of the most direct ways to communicate with your users. When managed the right way, they have the potential to add to your growth efforts.

Campaign Monitor is just the tool to help you manage your campaigns. With simple drag-and-drop templates, your email campaigns stand out from your competitors. In addition to this, test and track your campaigns before and after you send them.

Campaign Monitor collects data to help you learn about your audience so that you can optimize future campaigns. The summary below is based on users. Using the data you collect from users, Customer. It looks at what actions users take while using your product to help you create emails, push notifications and more to increase user engagement and product growth. It makes it really easy for you to learn on the go and incorporate your key learnings.

To help you further, it measures metrics, like conversions based on user behavioral data, that it uses to build profiles. It offers a day trial and four plans to choose from depending on your needs and the size of your user base. There's nothing more frustrating from a customer's point of view than to wait longer than expected for a response that doesn't answer the question.

It is unprofessional and can damage your business. But these things can easily happen when you have a ton of incoming messages. The key to solid relationships with your customers is through timely, organized and engaging communication. And this is a lot easier if you have the right tool. As your product grows, the amount of feedback from users also increases.

With this in mind, Zendesk aims to help you speed up your customer support and boost your efficiency. The great thing about Zendesk is that it grows with you to meet your evolving needs.

For instance, it offers an integrated call center and live chat software for your customer-facing team. It also offers a shared team inbox, which is an opportunity for teams to collaborate better. All of this can be measured by the new analytics and reporting feature.

With it you can see how your team is performing and the impact that has on your customers. It offers a day trial, but after that you have the option to choose from five plans that are billed either monthly or annually. If your customer-support needs range from sales to technical to campaign management and beyond, TeamSupport offers a comprehensive suite of features for you. It integrates with products like Dropbox and MailChimp to make your support efforts run smoothly.

What's great is that it's customizable for small and large businesses. As your company grows and customer support needs become more targeted, TeamSupport adjusts to accommodate your needs.

For example, customize your reports and dashboard to include additional information as you increase your customer data. It's available across different operating platforms like iOS and Android.

Plus, no matter where your team is located, they can connect with each other by using the internal chat feature.

LiveAgent is a help desk support platform that offers live chats with your customers, email support and social media integration.

Top 10 Tools Used By Product Managers

Product management is gradually becoming the cornerstone role within most organizations. However, there are few tools dedicated to fit the needs of product management professionals. Buyer expectations are higher than ever, and many companies sell long-lived products that depend on strong customer relationships. The best product management software goes beyond the development and deployment stages and includes features for building a strategy around the entire lifespan of the product. Today, as the novelty of remote work is quickly becoming the norm , the demand for seamless and glitch-free platforms is rising. Nowhere is this demand for perfection more pronounced than in the product management software space which is seeing a massive influx of new solutions for a plethora of niches. Competition has also led to consolidation which is great news for the end-user.

Internal Product Management

We're a place where coders share, stay up-to-date and grow their careers. Internal products are crucial to the smooth functioning of businesses. The position of internal tool product manager nomenclature may vary is becoming increasingly common as companies strive to construct their internal solutions to meet unique corporate goals. Unlike front-end product managers, internal product managers work within the confines of the corporate environment. Internal tool product management has well-defined technological requirements, yet benchmark competencies for internal tool product managers are largely lacking or ambiguous. Internal product managers have to cope with high volumes of inputs coming from all areas of the company. They are in proximity to users as well as internal stakeholders. As a result, the ability to communicate effectively is highly significant for an internal product manager. This article will guide you through the basics of internal tools and show you how you can thrive as an internal tool product manager by merging low-code and no-code technologies with the existing internal tools. Internal tools are software or applications meant to aid IT departments, developers, and other internal business users in being more productive.

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To build the best possible product, product managers advocate for customers within the organization and make sure the voice of the market is heard and heeded. Thanks to this focus on the customer, product teams routinely ship better-designed and higher-performing products. In tech, where entrenched products are quickly uprooted by newer and better solutions, there is more need than ever for an intimate understanding of customers and the ability to create tailored solutions for them. What is a product roadmap and why do you need one?

Lessons learned from managing internal products

Evolving the Scaled Agile Framework:. Update to SAFe 5. Guidance for organizing around value, DevSecOps, and agility for business teams. Clear explanations and actionable guidance. SAFe Distilled 5. To do this, they collaborate with a wide range of people to identify and define customer needs, understand the Solution Context , and develop the Program Vision , Roadmap, and Features required to meet these needs.

Applying product management to internal platforms

A lot to learn, but worthwhile to access the unique and special value AI can create in the product space. Whether you manage customer-facing AI products, or internal AI tools, you will need to ensure your projects are in sync with your business. This means that the AI products you build align with your existing business plans and strategies or that your products are driving change in those plans and strategies , that they are delivering value to the business, and that they are delivered on time. A PM for AI needs to do everything a traditional PM does, but they also need an operational understanding of machine learning software development along with a realistic view of its capabilities and limitations. Join the O'Reilly online learning platform.

Not enough effort has been made to understand the people using data products, what they want to get done, and the broader context in which they operate. I believe there is one emerging role that could radically reduce the gap between the insights offered by data analytics and the customers who could benefit from them. That role is the Data Product Manager. Across the globe, businesses are investing billions of dollars in data analytics — with minimal return.

When looking at digital products specifically, they are also broken down into two types: external and internal, as summed up clearly in the diagram below. An external digital product is a product that a team builds and makes available for those outside of their company to derive value from. Facebook, TikTok, and even our very own airfocus , the first modular product management platform, are external products. An example of an internal product was BaseCamp when it was initially created by 37signals. Managing an agency in , Jason Fried and his confounders built Basecamp as an internal project management tool to manage their work with the clients.

Introducing Zonka 2. Read all about it. Written by Nikhil Dawer Jul 01, And it is a long process where you first launch a product, market it, sell it, then come to know the shortcomings in the product through feedback, and then work on them. A better approach is to collect Product Feedback before launching it and launch a better final product out in the market.

There are many specialties within the vast world of product management. The type of product manager that an organization is looking for will depend on a myriad of factors such as the product type software, hardware , business model SaaS, PaaS, IaaS , industry fintech, healthcare, etc , or the maturity of the organization start-up, growth, enterprise to name a few. A lesser-known, but significant difference in product management is the difference between an internal and external product manager. An internal product manager builds tools and services to solve problems internal to an organization and is focused on customer enablement.