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Product teams need both, but an early-stage startup might get away with just one.
As made obvious by their names, product management tools and issue trackers serve two different types of roles, but when you have a small team and you’re trying to launch a product on a lean budget, you can’t afford to set yourself up with dozens of tools. So what should lean teams consider when they’re picking which one to get?
If you’re just after the Tl;Dr, you should jump straight to “Issue tracker vs product management platform: what should you use”, where you’ll find a sweet Venn diagram to summarize our answer.
What is a product management tool?
Product management tools are comprehensive platforms designed to help develop and manage a product from conception to launch. This means they need to cover a number of different functionalities, such as:
- Roadmap planning and product cycle management
- Feature prioritization, or the ability to describe and score items in a task list
- Market research
- Task management
- Team collaboration
These tools tend to be about the macro perspective, and are built to make the job of a product manager easier. We will unpack what that means a bit further down.
What is an issue tracker?
An issue tracker, on the other hand, is more about identifying, tracking, and managing issues and bugs that come up as the team develops a product or a new feature. It’s a platform that organizes issues in a way that makes it easy for a team to collaborate on their methodical resolution.
They cover functionalities like:
- Task assignment to users, prioritization, and statuses
- Team collaboration and sharing features, such as comment threads, attachments, and mentions
- Workflows and automation to support the process of identifying bugs and issues, capturing them, and sharing them in the appropriate format. This can be anything from pre-formatted templates to browser extensions.
To keep things clear, we’re referring here to cross-functional issue tracking that covers every aspect of a product, from features to copy to design, and not automated software testing where a QA engineer builds test scenarios and lets a machine run them.
Why product managers use both types of tools
In larger tech teams, it’s common for product squads to use both. The product management tool is where they build a roadmap according to their product strategy, score and prioritize features, and gather and organize customer feedback or market research. This is especially useful when your product is mature enough to have a complex set of features and a long, robust roadmap.
The issue tracker, on the other hand, is where they list a backlog of things that need to be fixed, such as broken pieces of the user experience, missing elements in the design, or even mistakes in the copy that show up in unexpected places in the product or the website. These issues are captured either by members of the product team themselves, or by other team members or even by external users.
Issue tracker vs product management platform: what should you use?
You need to consider the features you need to make a choice of course, but also your priorities as a team. The way we see it, the decision comes down to three factors.
Features
The first step is to compare the features you’re most likely to find in each type of tool. There is some overlap between the two, but some substantial differences as well.
Issue trackers are more about getting cross-functional teams to collaborate better and to use their time wisely in the process of identifying, capturing, and solving issues. These tools have to cut down on manual tasks at all costs, because people will spend long periods of time on them during QA and review phases.
Product management tools, on the other hand, are all about reflection and exploration, and while they need some task organization functionalities as well, they are more about deciding which tasks need to be done and in what order, and not so much about whether the tasks are getting done.
If you’re not really a Venn diagram person, we’ve summarized things in this table instead:
Proactive versus Reactive
One way to look at the question is that product management platforms are supposed to help you look forward, and support your setting of the roadmap, milestones, and overall strategy of your product, whereas issue tracking tools are more reactive, and help you fix or iterate on something that you’ve already built.
Budget
The last consideration is not a small one, especially for small product teams running on an early-stage budget.
Product management platforms are expensive because their features are usually broader and more specific from one provider to another. For example, Productboard is great for centralizing feedback and turning it into feature ideas, whereas Aha has good feature scoring and prioritization functionalities.
Issue tracking tools, on the other hand, can be more lightweight and more focused, and they’re usually cheaper per seat, which can be a better choice for teams that don’t need something highly configurable, or with lots of bells and whistles. In many cases, product management tools can be as much as 3x as expensive per month, per seat. If you have even just 4 people working on your products, that difference adds up very quickly.
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So what’s the final word?
If you’re at a stage where planning is ‘one-and-done’ - for example, you’re working on your first product launch with a set list of features, or you’re revamping the branding of an existing product - then you don’t need to keep going back to the proactive part of the process.
If your team will spend a lot more time managing the issue tracking part of the problem, then you probably need an issue tracker.
This is especially relevant if you’re a small team, running on a lean budget, and able to manage the product planning part of the work with old-school methods, or with free tools, until you get to the point where a product management platform is needed.
Once you get to a point where your product vision grows and becomes more complex, or once you start having an actual ‘Product’ function, then it’s probably time to implement a proper product management tool as well, with all the really cool functionalities that come with it.
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