10 Best Product Development Software To Drive Innovation In 2023

monday.com is a project management software to help project managers plan and execute projects.

Why I picked monday.com: It has informative dashboards to help keep team members in the loop of news and other project developments. You can also use it to streamline the product development process by automating repetitive and straightforward tasks so product team members can concentrate on other crucial tasks. monday.com is the best product development software for large teams because it makes collaboration easier.

monday.com acts as a centralized platform where product team members can share files and communicate with each other. This product management software has pre-built templates product managers can use to launch new projects quickly. Its task management feature lets product managers assign tasks and monitor their progress to ensure that they meet deadlines.

monday.com Standout Features & Integrations

Features include resource and project management, time tracking, collaboration, file management, collaborative docs and reporting dashboards.

Integrations are available with other software critical to new product development, including Microsoft Teams, Dropbox, Google Calendar, Zoom, and Adobe Creative Cloud.

Overall, monday.com is a great tool both for teams who need high customization to adapt to their workflows and teams who are looking for a quick start using templates.

Wrike is a product management software with robust collaboration and PLM features that effectively manages product development.

Why I picked Wrike: Using this software as a product development tool is ideal thanks to its suite of features to improve collaboration, enhance visibility, improve quality stakeholder decision-making, accelerate collaboration, and boost team productivity. Wrike can help you understand the different components of your product development and effectively manage them as they progress through different stages. Kanban boards and multiple views can help you see the information the way you need to.

Additionally, its approval and cross-tagging features will speed up product development and visibility. On the one hand, approval workflows can involve different stakeholders and request approvals in a streamlined interface that promotes discussion. On the other hand, cross-tagging lets you tag a task across many different initiatives to increase the visibility of important activities that feed a higher-level strategy.

Wrike Standout Features & Integrations

Features include pre-built templates, custom request forms, interactive Gantt charts, visual proofing, workflow automations, time tracking, project portfolio management, and dashboards.

Integrations in Wrike include 400+ pre-built native integrations, like the most popular file management software from Microsoft, Google, and Dropbox, along with sales and marketing software from Salesforce and Marketo.

Craft.io is an end-to-end product management platform that supports product professionals in effectively managing the entire lifecycle of their digital products. It has industry-leading best practices built in, and supports product development from feedback collection and feature definition through to prioritization, capacity planning, road mapping, and portfolio management.

Why I Picked Craft.io: Product teams can use the software as a single source of truth during product development. Their product data is easily accessible, and they can create tailored, up-to-date roadmaps that connect their strategy to features.

Best practices are built into the platform's Guru layer. This can help even seasoned Product Managers create, view, update, adjust, and share the right product data more quickly and efficiently. For example, pre-built templates for product epics, user personas, and prioritization frameworks can help an experienced Product Manager develop these assets in minutes—as opposed to spending hours building them manually in static files.

Craft.io Standout Features & Integrations

Features include roadmapping, Guru views, data visualization, product management, prioritization, customer management, Gantt charts, workflow management/tracking, and capacity planning.

Integrations include Jira, Azure DevOps, GitLab, GitHub, Targetprocess, Okta, Google Workspace, Active Directory, SAML, Confluence, PingIdentity, and thousands of additional applications via a paid account with Zapier.

Craft.io starts at $19 per editor per month when billed annually. A 14-day free trial is also available.

Lucidchart is an intelligent diagramming tool that can help you communicate your product vision, build customer journeys and roadmaps, and communicate clearly with development and design teams.

Why I picked Lucidchart: I picked Lucidchart because of how important it is to build the foundation of a good product. Its intuitive drag-and-drop interface will help you quickly create user flows, low-fidelity mockups and other documentation that is important for the team to be on the same page about the product you are building.

Additionally, as a visual tool, it makes it easier for everyone to understand the information compared to a document or spreadsheet. And communication-wise, you can significantly minimize the chances of missing a product feature or having to do rework for something that wasn't clear.

Lucidchart Standout Features & Integrations

Features include real-time collaboration, diagram templates, shape library, interactive designs, data import and export, mobile app, automated diagramming, commenting, reviewing, and third-party integrations.

Integrations include Slack, Salesforce, GitHub, and LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and it fits within a suite of additional Lucid Software products for collaboration and ideation (Lucidspark) and cloud visualization (Lucidscale).

Lucidchart has a limited free version with which you can create up to 3 documents.

Unleash is a product management platform that simplifies the development process, helping teams move from ideation to launch more efficiently. It offers an ecosystem of tools, templates, and workflows that enable teams to focus on innovation and creativity while minimizing the effort required for administration and documentation. The software helps teams align their development efforts with strategies and goals by setting KPIs, tracking performance, and analyzing metrics. Users can submit ideas, prioritize them based on impact, feasibility, and effort, and assign them to specific team members.

Why I picked Unleash: Unleash provides Agile boards and development workflow features that help teams manage their projects and sprints effectively. The agile boards give teams a visual representation of their product backlog, sprint planning, progress, and testing. Users can move cards from one column to another, indicating their status and progress. It enhances team collaboration by enforcing code review, merge policies, and status updates on pull requests.

Unleash Standout Features & Integrations

Features include a feedback mechanism, feature toggles, analytical reports, templates, and Agile boards.

Integrations include Jenkins and GitLab, enabling automatic builds, continuous integration, and deployment.

Miro is a virtual whiteboard tool and collaboration platform. It can be used for various purposes including creating and managing both product roadmaps and product development workflows.

Why I picked Miro: If you're looking for a software that can shape-shift to fit your various needs, this might be a good choice. This platform lets you start from a totally blank canvas and create virtually any type of plan, map, wireframe, or other visual representation of information. You can also select from hundreds of ready-made templates to get started with.

Product development workflows are among the common use cases for the software. You can map out your workflow and track your progress, then iterate and use it again as many times as you need to. It's a helpful way to perfect your new product lifecycle development process.

Miro Standout Features & Integrations

Features include a template library, clustering, voting, timer, mind maps, freeform drawing, access controls, and GDPR and CCPA compliance.

Integrations include Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Google Workspace, Asana, monday.com, Jira, Dropbox, OneDrive, Notion, Airtable, ClickUp, and Unito, among others.

Amplitude is a data analytics tool to help you develop a combination of product features that can improve customer engagement and increase revenues. You can use Amplitude to identify weak points you can improve.

Why I picked Amplitude: The tool lets you conduct A/B tests to identify which product version customers like better. You can also use Amplitude to analyze product intelligence from multiple data sources, ensuring you have all the information you need to make an informed decision. Product data is critical in new product development because it can help you understand your customers’ needs, and Amplitude is the best software for gathering product intelligence.

You can use Amplitude to automatically capture user behavior and identify features that need improvement. You can use Amplitude as a central hub for product intelligence to guide the management and development team in making product development decisions. Amplitude also recommends content you can include in your software to improve customer engagement and conversion.

Amplitude Standout Features & Integrations

Features include advanced behavioral analytics, automatic syncs to 3rd party software, unlimited data sources, unlimited data destinations, dashboard templates, and collaborations tools.

Integrations include connections with other product development tools like Adobe Analytics, Marketo, Salesforce-CRM, and Zendesk.

Amplitude has a free version with limited features, and they provide pricing details for paid plans upon request.

Pendo is a product adoption software to help you develop products with features that matter to customers.

Why I picked Pendo: The software has an analytics feature that lets you track user behavior and gives you an idea of features that users adopt and those they ignore. You can use Pendo to include in-app guides during software product development to cut onboarding time and provide user support to improve customer satisfaction.

One of the best ways to improve a project is by gathering feedback from team members, and Pendo is the best product management tool for you if you want an efficient way of collecting and managing feedback. You can use Pendo to solicit new product ideas or share a product idea with team members or customers to ensure that a feature will make a product more usable and help increase revenues.

Pendo Standout Features & Integrations

Features include in-app tooltips and best practices, onboarding guides, analytics, sentiment analysis, road mapping with customizable swimlanes, customer feedback collection and grouping, and product journey analysis of your mobile app.

Integrations include Jira, Hubspot, Zendesk, Salesforce, Calendly, InVision, Gainsight, Looker, Microsoft Teams, and Slack. Additionally, you can access thousands of additional integrations through Zapier.

Pendo has analytics and sentiment analysis tools that will help you deliver better product experiences for your users.

Planview AdaptiveWork, previously known as Clarizen, is a new product development platform that makes it easy to prioritize and manage new product ideas for an accelerated go-to-market solution. Concepts can be collected and reviewed in a centralized location.

Why I picked Planview AdaptiveWork: The platform excels for cross-functional teams working on new product development. With features specifically designed to improve collaboration, various teams working through different methods can communicate complex issues with the push of a button.

Planview AdaptiveWork Standout Features & Integrations

Features in the platform integrate with other business systems to provide data crucial to a successful new product launch. Comprehensive reporting capabilities add more visibility to the ROI of new product development and help drive continuous improvements.

Integrations allow organizations to tailor new product development to their specific needs. These include Jira, Slack, Salesforce, Sharepoint, ServiceNow, Procore, and Tableau. You can also connect to thousands of additional apps using a paid account with Zapier.

Planview is a project portfolio management software for cross-functional teams that enables product organizations to optimize product portfolios and accelerate time-to-market.

Why I picked Planview: First, Planview has a resource management feature to help you allocate budget, resources, and manpower to projects. Then, the tool has a forecasting feature to help you anticipate demands and plan contingencies. It can also help you automate simple tasks to ensure that team members can concentrate on their assignments. One of the best ways to simplify complex projects is by breaking them down into simple tasks, and Planview is one of the best project management tools if you want to use agile in your product development.

This project management tool gives agile teams visibility of their progress to create a sense of urgency and identify project weaknesses they need to address. Finally, it has a visual analytics feature to help you track costs and revenue projections across your portfolio.

Planview Standout Features & Integrations

Features include configurable financial and resource capacity planning, portfolio management dashboards and analytics, multiple product roadmap displays, customer requirements and feedback capture, and product launch planning.

Integrations include out-of-the-box connections to Jira, Microsoft Teams, Workday, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Slack.

Planview is an integrated solution that connects product strategy, planning, ideation, prioritization, and development to delivery.