Product management is a customer-centric approach to product development, 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 moving past the next bright and shiny device.

But by definition, tasks like setting goals, gathering feedback, and tracking product development involve multiple input sources and collaboration tools. This means that there is always the potential for information overload and slow processes that are difficult to measure.

By adding automation to your tech stack, you can easily integrate your most used apps with your team’s product management tool. ZAPS – what we call Zapier’s Automated Workflows – scale out manual tasks so you can focus on your most important work.

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What is Product Management Automation?

Product management automation is about taking over the repetitive, manual parts of managing a product. Instead of spending hours updating the roadmap, sending reminders to stakeholders, or synchronizing feedback between tools, automation does the work behind the scenes.

At its core, product management automation connects your tools and workflows so you can focus on strategy and impact. You can automate things like turning customer feedback into feature requests from your help desk, when a launch date shifts in your project tracker, when someone is ready for a spec, or updating Jira.

It’s not about replacing the human parts of product management. When done right, automation becomes your calm, reliable teammate that moves everything (and everyone) forward in sync. Here are some ideas to get you started.

Keep your team in the loop

If it’s your job to coordinate development across departments and follow user feedback, you need to keep your team up to date. But relying on a manual process like sending an email or Slack message means someone (or more likely, several someones) on your team needs to check for update and draft notification messages.

Instead, set up automated workflows to ensure the right people are informed at all the right stages of product development and iteration.

By email

Maybe you’ve set up a recurring team workflow in a tool like ProcessStreet, which includes a checklist of tasks. Different team members can handle each task, which can easily lead to confusion and waste as everyone waits for the 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 keep everyone on the same page about workflow status, use one of these zips to send an email to the right person when a new task is checked into your product management software.

Through the 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 you update a new item in your product management app.

Send product updates automatically

Most product management teams are active on social media, emphasizing notifications about product updates and prompt engagement on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. If you use chainlog 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 make sure you never miss an opportunity to announce a new update or ask for user feedback, you can use one of these zips to create social or email posts directly from Beamer.

Track progress in project management tools

Although they are different, an effective product management team needs both Products Management and Project Management tools.

Product management tools help you conduct research, set product development strategies, and collect and integrate customer feedback. On the other hand, project management tools are more universal and focus on breaking down projects into tasks, assigning tasks to team members and monitoring the progress of each task.

But that means you’re dealing with at least two (if not more) apps to track your team’s workflows and tasks. Copying information and updates from one app to another can be a serious drain on your team’s time while putting important information at risk of falling through the cracks.

Instead, use one of these zips to ensure that no matter which project management tool your organization uses, everyone is on the same page about your team’s progress.

Pro tip: When you integrate Zapier MCP with ChatGPT or Cloud, you can perform 30,000+ actions right from your chat interface. For example, you might execute a command like this: “Summarize the key points from the last Spirit Review meeting,” or “Create a project roadmap for the upcoming quarter using existing backlog items.” To learn how to configure Zapier MCP, Check out our in-depth feature guide.

Update product management tools from your other apps

What if you want to assign tasks, add context, or create new preferences without opening your product management app? You can use automation to send information directly from your other most used tools to apps like product boards or shortcuts.

From team chat

If your team lives in Slack, this is probably where many 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 zips to automatically send new messages to your product management app based on a specific description.

From the farm

Collecting customer feedback is an important element of product management. Your team needs to gather information about 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 can choose a form builder like Google Forms or Typeforms, but you need a reliable way to translate those collected responses into actionable notes in your product management app. Zips like the one below let you create new stories or notes from new form responses.

Or, if you collect feedback from customer calls, this Zapier Agent Can extract key insights and pain points, then create PRD documents for any feature requests.

From other tools

No matter what tool your team uses, there’s a way to simplify the process of sending ideas and work to your product management app.

Whether you use GitHub to track software issues or map out your product development strategy on a Trello board, these ZAPs can send the right information to your product management tool.

If you want to connect to your product management app that doesn’t natively integrate with Zapier (yet), you can always use a Web hook To send data to a tool when a trigger event occurs. Here’s a template to get you started.

Simplify product management with automation

Product managers wear many hats, such as 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 that important information doesn’t slip through the cracks.

Integrate your team’s product management tool with 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 that’s just the beginning of what you can do. Check out our app directory Explore more ways you can automate your product management.

This article was originally published in December 2022.