This article will help you quickly compare and evaluate the best product development software and other product development cycle tools.
There are so many components to planning and building a viable product that it can make your head spin. A central tool is useful for syncing your product teams—taking your product strategy and using it to develop your product through prioritization, prototyping, testing, and all the way through to launch and post-launch.
In this post, I’ll explain what this software does and highlight some of the best product development software on the market today. I will also answer some FAQs that product managers are sure to find helpful.
The Best Product Development Life Cycle Software
Here’s a shortlist of the best product development software:
Product Development Management Software FAQ
What Is Product Development Software?
Product development software (sometimes called new product development software or just NPD software) is a digital tool that helps you develop a product whether you are interested in minimum viable product software development or a fully fledged alpha product with a feedback system for ongoing development.
It can help you with product roadmaps and planning, analyzing your existing product data for better decision-making, task assignment and organization, communication and collaboration, bug tracking, and feedback/revisions/updates.
What Are the Benefits Of Product Development Software?
NPD software can benefit your product teams because it’s a way to keep all elements of your product development in one, easy-to-access hub.
By maintaining one source of truth, you will be able to foster your development team to shorten their time to market and maintain a higher degree of accuracy in every step of the project.
What Is The Difference Between Product Design Software And Product Development Software?
Product design software focuses more on the interface, aesthetics, branding, and/or physical presence of the product. It will most likely become a component of the product development as a whole.
Product design software isn’t used to manage a product—it’s used by the designers to conceptualize, prototype, sketch, wireframe, etc. An examples of product design software is the popular AutoCAD, a design and drafting app often used by architects, engineers, and graphic designers.
How Does This Software Relate To Product Management Software?
Product development software is a type of product management software. For more details on product management software, take a look at these 10 Best Product Management Tools Of 2021.
Is There Free Product Development Software?
Yes! Some examples you might want to try include OpenProject, Trello, Taskade, Craftwork Marketplace, Productific, Productstash, and Bitrix24. Many tools have a free trial, too, if you want to try before you buy.
Product Development Process Software Comparison Criteria
What are we looking for when we select product design and development tools for review? Here’s a summary of my evaluation criteria:
Key Features:
- Idea Generation
- Product design tools
- Resource allocation
- Budgeting
- Task lists with dependencies
- Product roadmapping
- Issue tracking
- Product marketing
- Communication/collaboration tools
- Concept Testing
- Product implementation
Evaluation Criteria:
- User Interface (UI): Is it clean and attractive?
- Usability: Is it user-friendly and easy to learn? Does the company offer good tech support, user support, tutorials, and training?
- Integrations: Is it easy to connect with other tools, especially common tools used by product development teams like Google Suite, GitHub, etc? Any pre-built integrations?
- Value for $: How appropriate is the price for the features, capabilities, and use case? Is pricing clear, transparent and flexible?
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Overviews Of The 10 Best Product Development Software
Here’s a brief description of each of the NPD software that are featured on this top 10 list.
1. Wrike – best for rapid project scaling
2. Monday – best for collaboration gamification
3. Airfocus – best for clear, coherent roadmaps
4. Clubhouse – best for moving quickly, configuration and navigation
5. Kanbanize – best for a Kanban-style workflow
6. Pendo – best for product/idea sentiment surveys
7. Pie – best for progress report visualization
8. Planview – best for Agile product development
9. Favro – best for adoption and usability
10. Amplitude – Best for product intelligence reports
More Options
Here’s a few more that didn’t make the top list. If you need additional suggestions for handy NPD software, check these out.
- Creately – Great for planning, brainstorming, or designing anything visually.
- Canny – Great for collecting feedback for projects on your product roadmap.
- Bubble – Great for large scale enterprise product portfolio management.
- Airtable – Great for roadmapping with powerful filtering, sorting, and grouping.
- Zenhub – Great for a roadmapping solution inside of GitHub.
- Coda.io – Great for planning using “building blocks”—like tables and buttons.
- Aha.io – Great for capturing breakthrough ideas using their voting-based ideas portal..
- ProductBoard.com – Great for intelligent prioritizing of features and tasks.
- Jama Software -Great for defining, aligning, and developing complex products.
- HCL Software – Great for building a next-generation software portfolio.
- Whatfix – Great for driving digital adoption of your new product.
- WalkMe – Great for collecting and analyzing user journey data.
- Sopheon – Great for enterprise innovation management software and services.
What Do You Think About These NPD Software?
Have you tried out any software listed above? What NPD software would you add to this list? Do you have on-the-ground product development insights that you want to share? Your thoughts are welcomed in the comments!
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