Product management is a customer-centered approach to developing, marketing, and managing a product. Good product management leads to better-designed and more useful products—which is especially important in tech industries, where customer-centered products can keep you from being outshined by the next bright and shiny tool.
But by definition, tasks like setting objectives, collecting feedback, and tracking product development involve multiple input sources and collaboration tools. This means there's always the potential for information overload and slow processes that are difficult to scale.
By adding automation to your tech stack, you can easily connect your most-used apps to your team's product management tool. Zaps—what we call Zapier's automated workflows—let you scale manual tasks so you can focus on your more important work.
Zapier is the leader in workflow automation—integrating with thousands of apps from partners like Google, Salesforce, and Microsoft. Use interfaces, data tables, and logic to build secure, automated systems for your business-critical workflows across your organization's technology stack. Learn more.
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Keep your team in the loop
If it's your job to coordinate development across departments and act on user feedback, you need to keep your team up to date. But relying on manual processes like sending an email or Slack message means someone (or, more likely, several someones) on your team needs to check for updates and draft notification messages constantly.
Instead, set up automated workflows to ensure the right people are informed at all the right stages of product development and iteration.
Via email
Maybe you've set up a recurring team workflow in a tool like Process Street, which includes a checklist of tasks. Different team members might handle each task, which can easily lead to confusion and wasted time as everyone waits on each other.
Or, say you have a product testing and inspection process that requires multiple approvals and signoffs before moving to the next step. To save your team time and frustration—and to keep everyone on the same page about a workflow's status—use one of these Zaps to send the right person an email when a new task is checked in your product management software.
Send Gmail emails for new tasks checked on Process Street
Export completed SafetyCulture inspections and send via Gmail
Send Gmail emails for new visitors in Pendo reports
Via team chat app
If your team lives in Slack instead of Gmail, don't worry—you can set up the same automations with your favorite team chat tool. Easily keep team members informed of your progress by setting up automated chat messages anytime a new item is updated in your product management app.
Create Slack messages for checked Process Street tasks
Send Slack channel messages for new Productboard notes
Send channel messages in Microsoft Teams for new visitors in Pendo reports
Send product updates automatically
Most product management teams are active on social media, pushing notifications about product updates and prompting engagement on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. If you use changelog tools like Beamer to announce product updates in-app, why not make the same announcement on social and email feeds at the same time?
To ensure you never miss a chance to announce a new update or ask for user feedback, you can use one of these Zaps to create social or email posts directly from Beamer.
Create new Mailchimp campaigns for new Beamer posts
Learn more: Discover more ways to automate Beamer.
Track progress in project management tools
Even though they're different, an efficient product management team needs both product management and project management tools.
Product management tools help you research, set a product development strategy, and collect and integrate customer feedback. Project management tools, on the other hand, are more universal and focus on breaking projects into tasks, assigning tasks to team members, and monitoring each task's progress.
But this means you're likely dealing with at least two (if not more) apps to track your team's workflows and tasks. Copying over information and updates from one app to another can be a serious drain on your team's time while risking important information falling through the cracks.
Instead, use one of these Zaps to make sure no matter which project management tools your organization uses, everyone is on the same page about your team's progress.
Send channel messages in Microsoft Teams for new visitors in Pendo reports
Post Process Street task activity to Google Sheets
Create Trello cards for checked off tasks in Process Street
Create Airtable records for new tasks checked in Process Street
Add selected fields from new completed SafetyCulture audits to spreadsheet rows in Google Sheets
Update product management tools from your other apps
What if you want to assign tasks, add context, or create new priorities without opening your product management app? There are several ways you can use automation to send information to apps like Productboard or Shortcut directly from your other most-used tools.
From team chat
If your team lives in Slack, that's probably the place where a lot of your discussions, assignments, and ideas originate.
Instead of copying and pasting from one app to another, save yourself some time and bandwidth by using one of these zaps to send new messages fitting a certain description to your product management app automatically.
Create Productboard notes for new Slack messages posted to a channel
Add new Slack messages posted to channel as Clubhouse Stories
From forms
Collecting customer feedback is one crucial element of product management. Your team needs to gather information on what customers like (and don't like) about a new product experience—which means you should make it as easy as possible for customers to provide feedback.
You might opt for a form builder like Google Forms or Typeform, but you need a reliable way to translate those accumulated responses into actionable notes in your product management app. Zaps like the ones below let you create new stories or notes from new form responses.
Add new Google Forms responses as Clubhouse Stories
Add new Typeform entries as feedback notes on productboard
From other tools
No matter what tool your team uses, there's a way to simplify the process of sending ideas and tasks to your product management app.
Whether you use GitHub to track software issues or map your product development strategy on a Trello board, these Zaps can send the right information to your product management tool.
Add new Google Sheets rows to productboard as feedback notes
Make product management easier with automation
Product managers wear many hats, like researcher, strategist, software developer, and customer success specialist—just to name a few! That's why it's not unusual for your team to have a large, overlapping tech stack.
With Zapier, you can design automated workflows to help avoid data overload and ensure important information doesn't slip through the cracks.
Connect your team's product management tool to your other most-used apps to keep your team updated, send product updates to your customers, and ensure your organization's project management apps are always up to date.
And this is just the start of what you can do. Visit our App Directory to discover more ways you can automate your product management.
