Product management tools for 2025: what to use and why

As a product manager, you likely own a broad scope of work, from developing and managing roadmaps to running market and user research to analyzing feature adoption and iterating based on gleaned insights.

Given everything on your plate, you’ll likely need a large and constantly evolving set of tools to help execute on your goals.

We’ll break down the current list of tools worth leveraging, but let’s start by aligning on what product management tools look like in 2025.

What are product management tools?

A product management tool is any software that can help a PM build, launch, iterate, or scale a product or an aspect of a product, such as an integration, a security measure, or an AI feature.

Related: What is an AI product strategy? Plus, how to implement one effectively

Core categories of product management tools

Let’s take a closer look at the popular categories.

• Roadmapping and strategy: These tools let you develop and edit your product roadmaps across product lines and features. They also often include project management functionality (and if they don’t, they integrate with project management tools) to ensure key tasks get assigned and executed on time
  
  
• User research and feedback: You can use these tools to survey users within your product to gather timely, contextual feedback, see how users interact with your product organically, gather hard-to-reach panels and ask them questions related to your current or planned products or features
  
  
• Collaboration and documentation: These tools allow you to highlight the features and/or products you’re building, how you’re implementing them, your plans for building them, and more. You can also use these tools to lay out key cross-functional processes, such as how sprints are performed

Whatever you end up adding to these platforms should be visible to cross-functional partners and offer them the chance to make comments, perform edits, and add their own notes.

• Analytics and product intelligence: You can leverage these platforms to understand if and how users interact with certain product features, which can help you pinpoint opportunities—if any—for improvement. These platforms also allow you to perform more robust analysis on certain features’ functionality by letting you perform A/B tests, segment your analysis by a specific cohort, and more
  
  
• Collaboration & Documentation: These solutions allow you to lay out product specs, craft product objectives for certain initiatives, work with design on landing pages, and much more. Essentially, these tools are where you align with cross-functional teams on your product strategy and work with them on specific tasks that fall under your product roadmap
  
  

• Integration and API Management: The former type of solution lets you add integrations to your product more easily and can support your team in maintaining them, while the latter lets you manage your product’s API endpoints. In short, they serve different integration use cases but both allow you to support integrations with your product
  
  
• AI: The AI solutions for product managers is fast-evolving, but it includes a combination of mainstream AI chatbots, like ChatGPT, and AI features and functionality that’s included in tools within our other categories. For example, a tool within analytics and product intelligence can use AI to provide product managers with intelligent predictions on whether a certain feature change will influence a usage metric 

Related: What the product development lifecycle consists of

The best product management tools

Based on all the categories above, there are countless tools available for your team. To help you trim down your list, here are some that stand out in their respective categories.

Merge

Merge offers a unified API that lets you add hundreds of integrations to your product. This can help you be more competitive in sales cycles, retain customers at a higher rate, expand to target markets, and more.

The platform has 220+ reviews on G2 and an overall 5 star rating, is the leader in the G2® Grid for Unified APIs, and boasts the most impressive customer list of any vendor in the category—which includes companies like BambooHR, Navan, Ramp, BILL, and AngelList. 

Key features:

• A unified API that lets you access 220+ integrations across 6 software categories—file storage, accounting, ticketing, CRM, HRIS, and ATS

• A strategic post-sales function that helps customers decide on the best ways to price, market, and sell their product integrations
  

• Integration observability tools that help your customer-facing teams manage integration issues, such as fully-searchable logs and automated issue detection

Pros:

• Enables you to scale your integration offerings quickly and lets you maintain the integrations with ease—saving your developers countless hours and allowing you to offer product integrations much faster
  

• Provides enterprise-grade security features and complies with data privacy and protection regulations—like GDPR and ISO 27001—to keep your customers’ data safe
  

• Offers an extensive collection of case studies, validating that the platform can support a broad range of businesses and use cases

Cons:

• Only supports product integrations. If you need an API management solution or want to implement internal integrations, you’d need to look elsewhere

• Doesn’t currently support certain integration categories, like email service providers or data warehouses
  

• Focuses on supporting B2B SaaS companies, so if fall outside of this market, you’d need another solution

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Miro

Miro is a digital collaboration platform that can help your product team outline feature specs, project manage specific tasks, define specific user flows, and more.

The platform has nearly 8,000 reviews on their G2 listing with a 4.5 star rating, and they’re the leader in the G2 Grid® for Strategy and Innovation Roadmapping Tools.

Key features:

• Miro Intelligence lets users get feedback on their canvas, create diagrams from simple instructions, generate summaries and recommendations based on ideas, and more

• Broad range of templates to implement powerful canvasses in Miro quickly, such as a Technology Roadmap Template and a Go-to-Market Strategy Template

• Provides 160+ integrations with applications like Jira, Google Docs, and Microsoft Teams to help your teams use Miro more effectively

Pros:

• Known for its ease of use—even for users who are brand new to this type of solution

• Their AI features and functionality is second to none within their category

• Allows for real-time updates across its canvasses, which helps users collaborate more effectively

Cons:

• Doesn’t provide a version history for a given canvas, which can make it difficult to track what’s changed, who made a change, when the change was made, etc.

• Hasn’t fully invested in building out cross-category integrations. For example, they don’t offer HRIS integrations (yet), which could help you onboard users to and offboard users from Miro

• Some of their functionality isn’t available offline. For example, boards that were unopened without an internet connection can’t be opened when you go offline

https://www.merge.dev/blog/product-planning?blog-related=image

Notion

The productivity and note-taking platform lets PMs offer a centralized repository of product information, whether that’s information on a recently-launched feature, plans for upcoming feature releases, requests that are in the backlog, notes from important meetings, and more.

Like the other tools we’ve listed, Notion has impressive reviews on G2 (6,000+ reviews and a 4.5 star rating) and, given how versatile their platform is, they’re a leader in several categories, including the G2 Grid® for Project Management and the G2 Grid® for Knowledge Base. 

Key features:

• Discover product-related information, create or edit documentation on your product, analyze any product information that’s already documented in Notion (e.g., the priorities based on upcoming initiatives in the roadmap), and more through Notion AI

• Build out and modify a wiki that houses all of your product information, from your roadmap plans to your team’s org chart

• Manage specific product initiatives end-to-end through their Projects feature 

Pros:

• The platform’s broad feature set lets your team use it to support multiple processes

• Your cross-functional teams can also use it to collaborate with you and to support their function-specific work

• The platform is proven to work at all company stages, so it’d likely be a long-term solution for your business

Cons:

• Doesn’t support certain integration categories and individual integrations that are popular. For example, they don’t currently support integrations with SharePoint, Salesforce, and HubSpot

• Notion’s broad features and advanced functionality can take your team a bit of time to get up to speed on and comfortable with

• If your team adopts several use cases for Notion, you can end up becoming overreliant on it

Amplitude

The product analytics software lets you analyze product usage data, design experiments, and integrate with other systems to help other teams leverage user behavior insights (e.g., account managers reaching out to customers who reach a certain threshold of product adoption).

Amplitude has an impressive 4.5 star rating, 2,000+ reviews, and is the current leader in the G2 Grid® for Product Analytics.

Key features:

• Automated product insights reports to help you understand how much time users spend in your product, the pages they visit, the number of new users who return, etc.

• Templated reports to help kickstart your analysis faster, whether that’s related to adopting a certain feature, measuring a predefined product metric, tracking session engagement across your app’s pages, etc.

• Offers Amplitude AI, which offers a suite of AI tools to help you get insights faster, clean up your data more easily, and implement a broad set of improvements to get more value from the platform

Pros:

• Offers a broad range of solutions within product analytics, feedback, and testing, so you can avoid investing in several apps
  

• Proven enterprise-grade solution for B2B and B2C and across numerous industries, with brands like Adidas, Dropbox, Doordash, and CapitalOne all using it
  

• Insight templates help you adopt useful and well-built reports within a few clicks

Cons:

• Doesn’t integrate with certain categories you might need to take follow-up actions, like a project management platform
  

• Specializes in quantitative feedback; if you’re looking to gather more qualitative insights, you may need to invest in a separate solution
  

• Your team may take a bit of time to get comfortable with the platform, which is the sentiment from many of Amplitude’s G2 reviews (case in point—“Steep Leaning Curve” was the most frequently-cited drawback in their G2 listing)

How to select the right tools for your team

Given all the tools available, the process of evaluating and selecting the best ones for your organization can be daunting.

To help you navigate this exercise successfully, here are a few steps you can take.

Define your objective

This step is obvious but it’s critical in not only narrowing down the category of tooling you need but also the particular tools you should look at.

Here are just some examples of goals you can adopt:

• Monitor product usage metrics that allow us to accurately assess a given feature’s performance— and improve upon it—over time. You can also define the metrics you care about, like feature engagement count and feature use frequency, to help you pin down the product analytics tools that track these metrics
  

• Integrate with the 10 most requested ticketing solutions and file storage applications. This lets you whittle down the integration solutions by those that support these integrations

Your goal can also help inform your Request for Proposal (RFP) document, which will be critical at later stages of this process.

https://www.merge.dev/blog/product-experience-strategy?blog-related=image

Define requirements based on team maturity

Once you know the type of tool you need and are able to narrow down your list, you should reflect on the specific PMs on your team who’d use them and ask yourself the following:

• How technical are they? 
• How specialized are their roles? 
• How much capacity do they have?

The answers to these questions can help you better suss out the features your team will actually use and need now and which aren’t as appropriate (at least for the time being). You can also gather direct feedback from your team to pressure test your hypotheses.

Compare features, integrations, and support

Based on the RFP you put together, you can directly compare the solutions’ with one another along the criteria that matters most.

If possible, you should also participate in free trials with each solution to validate that their features and integrations work as advertised and that their support team is responsive and helpful. Based on this hands-on experience, you’ll likely know which solution is the best one for your team.

Pilot and validate internally

Finally, you should select a tool for a proof of concept to actually execute on your use cases. As part of this process, you should negotiate an out-clause in case the tool ultimately proves to be a bad fit. 

Assuming it works—and it likely will, given all the steps you followed—it’ll be a key tool in your product team’s tech stack.

Final thoughts

Given that your product team’s responsibilities have likely grown over time, you’ll need to adopt a broad set of tools to empower them.

If you can follow the steps above to identify and invest in best-in-class tooling across the board, you’re giving your team, and by extension your product, a competitive advantage in the years to come.

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