The PM tools that actually get used (and the ones that collect dust)

Your team bought six PM tools last year. You use three of them.

I know this because I’ve watched it happen at every company I’ve worked at. Someone demos a shiny new tool in an all-hands. Leadership gets excited. IT provisions licenses. The tool gets used enthusiastically for two sprints. Then it quietly joins the graveyard of unused subscriptions alongside that OKR software nobody opens and the “strategic planning platform” that holds exactly one outdated document.

The truth about product management tools is that most PM tool stacks are bloated. Teams buy tools they don’t need, underinvest in tools that would actually help, and end up doing their real work in three or four applications while paying for twelve.

After a decade of watching this cycle repeat, I’ve developed strong opinions about what actually gets used versus what collects dust. This isn’t a balanced “here are all your options” post. This is me telling you what works based on watching hundreds of PMs — including myself — actually do the job.

The tools PMs actually open every day

Before we talk about specialized software, let’s be honest about where PMs actually spend their time. Open your laptop right now and look at your dock. I’ll bet money on what’s there.

Notion or Confluence: the documentation layer

One of these is always open. Always. Every PM I know has either Notion or Confluence as their default thinking space.

The choice is straightforward:

• Notion if you want flexibility. It’s faster, prettier, and better for teams that value autonomy over standardization. Startups and growth-stage companies gravitate here. The database features are genuinely powerful once you learn them — I’ve seen PMs build entire product intelligence systems in Notion that rival dedicated tools.
• Confluence if you’re in enterprise and need compliance, integrations with Jira, and the ability to lock down permissions in ways that make legal teams happy. The UX is worse. The search is worse. But it’s what your company uses, so you’ll use it too.

Don’t try to fight this. If your company is on Confluence, don’t maintain a shadow Notion workspace. If your team chose Notion, don’t try to import Confluence conventions. Pick one and go deep.

[INTERNAL_LINK: Notion for product managers]

Jira or Linear: the work tracker

The Jira vs. Linear debate has a clear answer that depends on exactly one variable: your company’s size and compliance requirements.

Linear has better UX. Dramatically better. It’s faster, cleaner, and built by people who clearly hated using Jira. The keyboard shortcuts are excellent. The default workflows make sense. New teams should use Linear unless they have a specific reason not to.

Jira has better enterprise integrations. If you need to connect to ServiceNow, if you have audit requirements, if your security team mandates specific data residency — you’re using Jira. Also, if your company already has Jira deeply embedded, the switching cost probably isn’t worth it.

The real question is whether you even need one of these. If you’re a PM at an early-stage startup (under 15 engineers), you might get away with GitHub Issues or even a Notion board. But the moment you have multiple PMs or any complexity in your release process, you need a real issue tracker.

[INTERNAL_LINK: Jira for product managers]

Figma: non-negotiable

Figma isn’t optional. Every PM working with designers needs to live in Figma. You need to comment on designs, understand the design system, and increasingly, create your own rough wireframes and flows.

FigJam — Figma’s whiteboarding tool — has also become the default for any collaborative thinking session. It’s replaced Miro at most companies I’ve worked with, purely because designers are already in Figma and one fewer tool to manage matters.

There’s no real alternative here. Sketch lost. Adobe XD lost. InVision is gone. If you’re not in Figma, you’re not in the design conversation.

Slack or Teams: wherever the decisions happen

PMs live in chat. This is where you find out what’s actually happening, where you unblock engineers, where you catch the early signals of problems.

You use whatever your company uses. Slack is better. Teams is free with your Microsoft license. The choice was made above your pay grade. Optimize your notifications and learn the keyboard shortcuts for whichever one you’re stuck with.

One genuine tip: create a private channel or chat with yourself. Use it as a daily scratch pad for quick notes, links you want to remember, and thoughts you need to capture. It’s searchable, synced across devices, and faster than any note-taking app.

A spreadsheet: always

This is the dirty secret of product management tools: no matter how sophisticated your stack, you end up in Excel or Google Sheets for anything involving numbers.

Prioritization frameworks? Spreadsheet. Revenue projections for the business case? Spreadsheet. Capacity planning? Spreadsheet. Quick analysis of that data export from your analytics tool? Spreadsheet.

I’ve seen companies spend six figures on “product analytics platforms” only to have their PMs export the data to Excel to actually think through it. The flexibility of a spreadsheet is unmatched for exploratory analysis.

Don’t fight this. Get good at spreadsheets. Learn pivot tables. Learn VLOOKUP (or INDEX/MATCH if you want to feel superior). This skill will serve you longer than any dedicated tool knowledge.

Roadmap tools: the honest take

Roadmap tools are where the most money gets wasted. Companies buy expensive dedicated software, use it for one quarterly planning cycle, then revert to slides and spreadsheets.

Here’s the actual breakdown:

Productboard

Productboard is good for one specific thing: connecting customer feedback to your roadmap. If you’re drowning in feature requests from sales, support tickets with product ideas, and user interview notes — and you can’t keep track of what’s been requested and by whom — Productboard solves this.

It’s expensive. Genuinely expensive for what it does. But it’s worth it if you have 20+ people contributing feedback and you need to show stakeholders that their input is being tracked and considered.

If you’re a smaller team, you don’t need this. A Notion database with a feedback column does 80% of what Productboard does.

[INTERNAL_LINK: Productboard review]

Aha!

Aha! is the enterprise roadmapping tool. It has every feature you could imagine: strategy visualization, initiative mapping, resource planning, Gantt charts, portfolio views.

It’s overkill for most teams. If you have three PMs, you don’t need Aha!. If you’re running a product portfolio across 50 PMs with complex dependencies and executive reporting requirements, Aha! earns its keep.

The learning curve is steep. Budget significant time for setup and training if you go this route.

Linear as a roadmap tool

Here’s the trend I’m watching: Linear is increasingly replacing both Jira AND dedicated roadmap tools for engineering-led companies. Their project and roadmap views have gotten good enough that teams are consolidating.

The advantage is obvious: your roadmap and your actual work live in the same place. There’s no synchronization problem, no “the roadmap says X but the sprint says Y” confusion.

The disadvantage: Linear’s roadmapping is still more basic than dedicated tools. If you need sophisticated stakeholder views or complex timeline dependencies, you’ll hit limits.

For teams under 50 people building primarily for users (not enterprise), Linear-for-everything is increasingly the right answer.

Notion roadmaps

Notion works fine for simple roadmaps. A database with timeline view, status columns, and linked pages for details handles most needs.

Where Notion fails: complex stakeholder reporting. If you need to show the CEO a different view than the engineering leads, who need a different view than sales — Notion’s permission and view system isn’t built for this. You’ll end up maintaining multiple roadmaps, which defeats the purpose.

Use Notion for your roadmap if: you’re a small team, your stakeholders are few, and you’re already living in Notion anyway.

[INTERNAL_LINK: how to build a product roadmap]

The roadmap tool most PMs should actually use

Slides. I’m serious.

For stakeholder communication — which is the primary purpose of a roadmap — a well-designed presentation deck beats specialized software. You have complete control over what’s shown and what’s hidden. You can tell a story. You can present it in a meeting rather than sending a link people won’t click.

Use specialized roadmap software for planning and tracking. Use slides for communication. Trying to do both in one tool usually results in doing both badly.

Analytics tools: the split decision

Product analytics is where I see the biggest gap between tool investment and actual usage. Companies pay for Amplitude or Mixpanel, but most PMs barely scratch the surface of what these tools can do.

Amplitude vs. Mixpanel: the real difference

Amplitude is better for understanding user journeys and retention. Its behavioral cohorting is more sophisticated. If your key questions are “how do users progress through our product over time” and “what behaviors predict long-term retention,” Amplitude is stronger.

The tradeoff: steep learning curve. Amplitude is powerful but not intuitive. Budget time to actually learn it, or you’ll end up using 10% of its capabilities.

Mixpanel is better for event-based funnel analysis. If your key questions are “where do users drop off in this flow” and “how does this feature’s usage compare to that one,” Mixpanel is faster to use and easier to set up.

For most product teams, Mixpanel is the right choice. Amplitude’s power is overkill unless you have a dedicated analytics person or a PM willing to invest significant time in learning it.

[INTERNAL_LINK: product analytics for PMs]

Google Analytics: the tool PMs should use more

Here’s an unpopular opinion: most PMs should spend more time in Google Analytics before buying Amplitude or Mixpanel.

GA4 is free. It’s already installed on your site. It answers a huge number of questions that PMs often claim they “need analytics tools” to answer: where do users come from, what pages do they visit, where do they drop off, what’s our conversion rate.

The event tracking in GA4 is genuinely good now. For many products — especially B2B products with relatively simple user journeys — GA4 is enough.

Buy Amplitude or Mixpanel when you’ve exhausted what GA4 can tell you. That point comes later than most PMs think.

Data warehouses: the unsexy infrastructure that matters

The most underrated investment in product analytics isn’t a tool — it’s getting your data into a warehouse where you can actually query it.

If you have Snowflake, BigQuery, or Redshift with properly modeled product data, a PM with basic SQL skills can answer questions that would be impossible in Amplitude or Mixpanel. The flexibility of SQL beats any product analytics UI for complex questions.

If you’re a PM at a company without this infrastructure, advocate for it. It’s the foundation that makes everything else work.

[INTERNAL_LINK: SQL for product managers]

Discovery and research tools: where PMs underinvest

This is the category where I see the biggest gap between what PMs should be doing and what they actually do. Most teams have sophisticated tools for building and shipping but primitive tools for understanding what to build.

Dovetail: the best tool most PMs don’t use

Dovetail is purpose-built for qualitative research. It handles interview transcripts, tagging, pattern identification, and insight synthesis.

Almost no PM uses it. They should.

The problem is that Dovetail requires changing behavior. You need to actually record your interviews, upload them, tag them, synthesize them. Most PMs take notes in a doc, write up a summary, and move on. The summary lives in that doc forever, never synthesized with other research, never tagged for future reference.

If you do more than five user interviews a month, Dovetail pays for itself in time saved finding previous research and patterns you wouldn’t otherwise notice. But it requires discipline to use.

[INTERNAL_LINK: user research for product managers]

Hotjar or FullStory: more useful than you think

Session replay tools like Hotjar and FullStory get dismissed as “nice to have.” They’re more valuable than that.

Watching real users interact with your product surfaces insights that no analytics dashboard can provide. You see where they hesitate. You see when they try to click something that isn’t clickable. You see the workarounds they invent when your UX doesn’t match their mental model.

FullStory is more powerful (better search, better integrations, better analysis features). Hotjar is cheaper and easier to set up. For most teams, Hotjar is enough.

The key is actually watching sessions. Schedule 30 minutes weekly to watch 10-15 user sessions. You’ll learn more about usability issues than any number of metrics can tell you.

User interview infrastructure: keep it simple

For actually talking to users, the dominant stack is boring: Calendly for scheduling, Zoom for calls, Otter.ai or Zoom’s transcription for transcripts.

There are fancier options. User Interviews is excellent for recruiting participants. Respondent is good for B2B research. Various products promise to streamline the entire research process.

But the basic stack works. The bottleneck in user research is never the tools — it’s making time to do the research in the first place. A PM with Calendly and Zoom who talks to five users weekly learns more than a PM with every research tool who talks to users quarterly.

AI tools: the new layer in the PM stack

In 2025, AI tools are no longer “emerging” or “experimental” — they’re standard. Every PM I know uses them regularly. Here’s what’s actually getting used:

Claude for writing and analysis

Claude has become my default for drafting PRDs, analyzing documents, and thinking through problems. I paste in messy notes from a brainstorm and get structured output. I upload a competitive analysis and get a synthesis. I describe a feature and get a first-draft spec.

The key is treating it as a thinking partner, not an autopilot. Claude’s first draft is rarely publishable, but it’s a faster starting point than a blank page. I edit heavily, but starting from something is faster than starting from nothing.

ChatGPT works fine too. Claude is better for longer documents and nuanced analysis in my experience, but both are useful. Pick one and learn its quirks.

[INTERNAL_LINK: AI tools for product managers]

Perplexity for research

Perplexity has replaced most of my Google searches for market research, competitor analysis, and technical learning. It synthesizes sources, cites them, and lets me ask follow-up questions.

For “what’s the market size of X” or “how does competitor Y approach this problem” or “explain this technical concept” — Perplexity is faster and more useful than traditional search.

It’s not perfect. Always check sources for anything consequential. But for the exploratory research that fills much of PM time, it’s a significant productivity gain.

Granola (or similar) for meeting notes

Granola is my current choice for meeting transcription and summarization, but this space is evolving fast. The point is: you should have something automatically capturing meeting content.

The alternative — manually taking notes while trying to participate — is worse. You miss things. Your notes are incomplete. An AI transcription tool lets you be fully present in the meeting and have a complete record afterward.

The key features to look for: works with your video conferencing platform, provides accurate transcription, generates usable summaries, makes content searchable. Granola does this well; so do several alternatives.

What AI tools won’t replace

A quick note on limits: AI tools accelerate work but don’t replace judgment. Claude can draft a PRD; it can’t decide what to build. Perplexity can summarize market research; it can’t determine your strategy.

The PM skill that matters most in 2025 isn’t learning to use AI tools (that’s table stakes) — it’s knowing what questions to ask them and when their output needs human override.

The minimum viable PM stack

Let’s say you’re starting a new role, your company has no tools, and you have zero budget. Here’s what you use:

• Notion (free tier): documentation, roadmaps, meeting notes, everything
• Linear (free tier): issue tracking, sprint management
• Figma (free tier): design collaboration, wireframing, whiteboarding
• Google Analytics: product analytics — it’s free and probably already installed
• Claude (free tier): writing assistance, analysis, research
• Google Sheets: everything else

This stack handles 90% of PM needs. Teams of three or four PMs can run on this indefinitely. Only upgrade individual tools when you hit specific limits.

The paid versions of these tools mostly add collaboration features and remove usage limits. They’re worth it at scale, but not when you’re starting out.

The tools that sound good but don’t get used

Now for the graveyard. These tools get bought enthusiastically and abandoned quietly:

Most dedicated “PM suites”

Tools that promise to be “everything a PM needs in one place” rarely deliver. The problem is that PM work is inherently fragmented across many domains. A tool that tries to handle documentation AND issue tracking AND roadmapping AND analytics does all of them worse than dedicated tools.

I’ve seen companies buy these platforms, use them for one quarter, then revert to their previous tool stack while the PM suite subscription continues for three years because nobody wants to admit the mistake.

Many dedicated roadmap tools

As mentioned above: companies buy roadmap software, realize the real work is communication (which happens in

Frequently asked questions