For decades components of the Microsoft Office Suite dominated the tools used for planning and monitoring product development. And they still continue to do so in most cases. For example painting roadmaps with PowerPoint allows many degrees of freedom and therefore is pretty convenient. Well established and more rigourous tools like requirements management and agile planning tools have expanded their scope to higher level planning levels in the last decade. Some of them allow to create and manage roadmaps for products with detailed planning information underneath. In recent years however a new category of tools emerged. They directly target the needs of product managers. Those tools support specifically business planning, user research, roadmapping, agile planning, and execution. Product manager need to understand what kind of benefits are provided by those different tools and how to leverage them in their multi-faceted jobs. The session will provide insights about various tool offerings. Examples are taken from Strategyzer, Aha!, UserVoice, Version One, Jama, JIRA, Trello and others.

Gerald Heller is principal consultant of Software.Process.Management and partner at pd7.group. He draws on more than 30 years experience with global large scale software development. Gerald helps clients to improve their business success with optimized requirements management and software product management practices and processes. Using a holistic approach he also includes application lifecycle management tools in his offerings, allowing optimal process and tool alignment. Some prominent examples of tools are Micro Focus ALM, JIRA, Aha! and Jama from Jama Software. Prior to his work as an independent consultant and trainer he worked for HPE Software being responsible for the worldwide requirements management practice. Gerald holds a diploma in computer science from Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen, Germany. He is a member of GI and ASQF. Gerald is founding member of the International Software Product Management Association and acts as a member of the board.