Software development can be a closed loop. The only tools you need to make software are software. Post-its and white boards are great, but what you really need is good apps. Below I’ll rundown the essential categories of apps and their roles.
- Task management – A system where you can track work. You must be able to visualize the work of your team. People need clear task lists and priorities to execute your plans effectively. The most important tool for PMs. PMs who don’t intimately know and have a love/hate relationship with their task management software are PMs who don’t know how to operate a team. Know it, work it, customize it.
- Calendars – A shared calendar system is key to almost any business. But for PMs it has special importance. Keep your calendar as public as possible and up to date. Set work hours. Always add agendas or at least comments to any meetings you create. Don’t expect engineers to use their calendars effectively. They often don’t accept or decline meeting requests and may not open their calendars very often. Always follow up in person or email, and be patient, as long as they show up when you need them.
- Notes – Most people use cloud note systems, although me and plenty of other people I know use draft emails. It works well, and makes turning notes into/out of emails is easy. But whatever works. PMing is a complex job, you need to take notes, or have people take them for you. Notes and note systems are generally the way that passing thoughts and verbal communication make it into the task management system and thus into reality.
- Wireframe or prototype tool – This is probably your UX or visual designers thing, but you should be familiar with this key tool. This is how specs and ideas become interfaces, so it matters.
- IDEs – Similar to the above. This isn’t where you live, but its good to be a comfortable visitor. Its also good to know, at a high level, what kind of things their tools make easy or hard. Knowing the pain points in the dev chain is also helpful for understanding team flow.
- Terminal – (Or Console or whatever command line interface.) It comes in handy. Its not as hard as you think. It buys you a ton of cred with engineers if you genuinely know your way around a command line, even just a bit.
- Collaborative documents – Again, this is a tool any business team needs. But so do you. Don’t work on docs, proposals, specs, and so on alone or on local machine-bound word processors. Open your process up for comments and socializing.
- Slideware – Decks are the distilled essence of product management. Persuasion, evidence, argument, narratives, and pretty much the whole job in hypercard form. Unfortunately most people are bad at decks, and give slideware a bad rep. But its worth taking classes or at least watching videos about how to create and especially give compelling presentations. It’s a developable skill and usually the primary high level persuasion tool, so it is worth it.
- Chat – I hate IM’ing. But when you work with remote teams or from home, it’s your mouth and ears. Luckily, my distaste for synchronous text conversations is not, it seems, common. So you probably don’t mind, or maybe you even like, instant messaging. But if, like me you’re not a texting natural, you’ll need to learn to embrace it. Some people, often introverts, engineers or ESL speakers, are much more effective communicators over text.