What are the types of product discovery tools?

There are tools to help at different stages of the product discovery process; we recommend you organize your tool stack according to these continuous product discovery insights and activities: Behavior analytics and product experience insights Collecting customer feedback Team collaboration and user journey mapping Stakeholder alignment and communication Keep in mind that some tools span multiple categories. For example, Contentsquare’s Heatmaps and Session Replay tools target the 'behavior analytics and digital experience insights' category, and our Surveys and other Voice of Customer tools target the 'collecting customer feedback' category.

How do you choose the right product discovery tool?

The first step in choosing the right tool is identifying the product discovery outcome you want to achieve. For example, you may want to understand why a certain segment of users is slow to adopt one of your most valuable features. The next step is to identify which discovery activities will help you achieve your desired outcome. In the example above, you may choose to collect feedback from this specific segment of users at the moment they encounter the under-utilized feature. Finally, search for tools to help you perform the discovery activity. Using the example above, you could choose Contentsquare’s feedback widget or Surveys tool to ask users for their opinions in context.

How do I protect my users’ privacy when using a third-party tool for product discovery?

When choosing between an internal or third-party product discovery tool, privacy is your top priority. It's typically faster and less expensive to partner with a third-party tool over building a solution yourself. But look for evidence that the third-party tool has solid security and privacy features. Contentsquare has always focused on protecting your privacy and keeping your data secure. We never sell your data, and you can request access to it at any time. We’re fully compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) to enhance and protect your privacy rights.

11 Product Discovery Tools and Software to Streamline Your Workflow

Product managers, designers, and UX researchers know the drill: your inbox is bursting with shiny new tools, each one claiming to be the answer to better product discovery.

But who has time to test them all, let alone figure out which ones actually fit your workflow?

To help you out, we’ve rounded up the most popular product discovery tools—and grouped them by the key activities they support, so you can find what you need, skip what you don’t, and get back to building things your users actually want.

Want to go beyond surface-level analytics?

Contentsquare shows you how users really experience your product, down to every click, tap, and hesitation.

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There are tools to help at different stages of the product discovery process; we recommend you organize your tool stack according to these continuous product discovery insights and activities:

Behavior analytics and product experience insights
Collecting customer feedback
Customer journey mapping
Stakeholder alignment and communication

Product discovery tools for behavior analytics and digital experience insights

One of the most important elements of product discovery is understanding the digital experience to learn not just how users interact with your product and website, but why they take certain actions.

Tools that track user behavior give you key information about the user journey and their experience in your product, including highlighting blockers, pain points, and gaps that need to be filled to help them accomplish their jobs to be done (JTBD).

Here are some tools that can help:

1. Contentsquare’s Experience Analytics

Contentsquare’s Experience Analytics product (that's us!) is a powerful discovery tool that lets you analyze user behavior in your product and quickly translate your learnings into actionable insights.

For example, Contentsquare Heatmaps show you how users interact with your product, revealing the most popular and unpopular areas of your website pages. Heatmaps expose opportunities to improve your design, messaging, and functionality within the product to guide users toward the actions that will help them accomplish their JTBD.

Use Contentsquare’s Session Replay tool to see how real users experience your product. See recordings of clicks and mouse movements, and identify blockers or issues that users encounter as they navigate your site.

Recordings help you go beyond what users experience on your site to understand why they behave a certain way. For example, Contentsquare lets you filter by sessions with rage clicks or errors to see where people get stuck or frustrated, and expose problem areas in your product.

[visual] Session replays of a user browsing different homepages, captured using Contentsquare

2. Google Analytics and Tag Manager

Google Analytics (GA) and Google Tag Manager (GTM) are great website analytics and behavior tracking tools.

Many of your new users’ journeys begin by visiting your website to learn more about you and your product—but they'll explore your site before and after they become active users.

Create specific conversion goals to track the user journey on your site to understand how easy (or not-so-easy) it is for people to navigate from one step to the next. Both GA and GTM integrate with Contentsquare, so you can connect the dots between what's happening on your site and why it happens.

3. Tealium

Tealium is a powerful customer data platform that acts as a single source of truth for user data and events collected from across your digital ecosystem. It helps you organize and segment users based on specific behaviors and attributes.

Use Tealium to identify which user segments derive the most value from your product. These insights guide product experience improvements and help you prioritize features that align with what users actually want.

Contentsquare integrates with Tealium—for example, you can filter Contentsquare’s session replays by Tealium’s user traits to understand what issues different types of users encounter—so you can fix them faster and more efficiently.

Product discovery tools for collecting customer feedback

Comprehensive product discovery includes both quantitative and qualitative user data. Complement the data you get from analytics and product experience insights tools with voice-of-the-customer (VoC) feedback from user interviews, surveys, and feedback widgets.

Understanding the user journey helps you uncover people’s goals and motivations for using your product so your team can empathize with customers and build a product experience based on their needs.

4. Contentsquare’s VOC product

Next up is Contentsquare’s VOC product, which gives you actionable customer feedback to complement the insights from heatmaps and session replays.

Contentsquare’s feedback widget lets users provide direct feedback about their experience. The widget serves as a virtual suggestion box, where users can select an on-page feature or element to reference with in-the-moment feedback.

Use Contentsquare Surveys to ask questions about the product and user experience. When people show signs of frustration, like when a user is about to abandon a page, you can trigger a survey to ask why and capture valuable feedback about your product when it’s fresh in their minds.

Visual - Check out survey — An example of a Contentsquare survey

User Tests and Interviews are another powerful layer in Contentsquare’s product discovery toolkit. With these tools, you can go beyond passive observation and actively test hypotheses, validate features, or uncover unmet needs.

Whether moderated or unmoderated, User Tests give you structured insights into how real people interact with your product. And when paired with Interviews, you gain the context behind their behavior—why they hesitated, what they expected, or where the friction lies.

5. UserTesting

UserTesting is a platform that lets you capture video-based feedback. Seeing people's expressions and body language while using your product can give you a good sense of how they feel about it and help you empathize with their needs.

Adding this sort of qualitative user insight to what you learn from behavior analytics tools and surveys will give you a better understanding of the user experience, which will help your team to plan and prioritize your product backlog.

Product discovery tools for team collaboration and user journey mapping

Mapping the customer journey according to what you’ve learned about the user experience (UX) helps your product team generate hypotheses, identify questions to ask customers, and realize new features your users need.

Journey mapping is a vital part of the product discovery process and requires the right tools to help your product team and stakeholders collaborate toward shared goals.

Here are a few tools we recommend:

6. Miro

Miro is a powerful online whiteboard that lets virtual teams collaborate in real-time. Its sticky notes feature helps your product team hold digital affinity mapping sessions, while the diagramming tool makes user flow exploration easy.

Use Miro with analytics and tracking tools like Contentsquare to visualize your insights and share an overall picture of the user journey.

For example, you could use Miro to create a visual walkthrough of your user journey map with screenshots of your app, and add heatmaps to illustrate the pages that need improvement.

7. ProductPlan

ProductPlan is a drag-and-drop roadmapping tool that helps you collaboratively build product roadmaps in just a few clicks. It comes with customizable layouts and unlimited roadmaps, which helps teams align on product strategy.

Use the roadmaps you create in ProductPlan to align your entire team on your product strategy. You can also share your roadmap with stakeholders across the business to give everybody a clear picture of where the product is in the development lifecycle—and keep everyone pulling in the same direction (more on that later!).

8. Jira

Jira makes it easy for cross-functional product teams to plan, track, release, and report throughout the product development process using Scrum and Kanban boards to create easy-to-follow workflows with an intuitive drag-and-drop interface.

You can also use Jira to create roadmaps to keep a clear view of the big picture, track product requests, and use extensive reporting features to keep the team in the loop.

Product discovery tools for stakeholder alignment and communication

Getting stakeholder buy-in for a user-centric product vision is one of the biggest challenges for a product manager, and one of the most important outcomes of the product discovery process.

During product discovery, focus on capturing user stories to share with your team and stakeholders to effectively communicate user needs. This will help your team understand how user data guides your product decisions.

Here are 3 tools we recommend:

9. Loom

Loom is a simple tool that makes it easy to record and share video messages using your camera, screen, or both. It has a handy browser extension so you’re only ever a couple of clicks away from starting your video message.

Use Loom to walk your team and stakeholders through your product discovery process. For instance, you can record a video while you share your customer journey map on Miro, and in the same recording, look at Contentsquare heatmaps of problematic pages.

Loom is great for async collaboration, especially as more teams begin to work remotely and need to communicate with teams distributed across different time zones.

10. Zoom

Zoom probably needs little introduction, but in case you’ve somehow missed it, it’s a robust video conferencing platform that makes it easy to hold engaging, collaborative meetings with colleagues and customers.

Not only is it a great way to host virtual team meetings, but Zoom makes it easy to record and save customer interviews or product team collaboration sessions to the cloud. You can then trim snippets to share with stakeholders.

Sharing short clips of customer interviews is a great way to keep stakeholders informed about the user experience and help them understand the data that inspires your product choices.

11. Slack

Slack enables communication and collaboration within your company through private and public channels. It makes it easy to share frequent, bite-sized updates with your team—which might include short Loom walkthroughs or clips of customer interviews from Zoom.

Slack also has many integrations that make it easy to share your work and customer insights. For example, with the Contentsquare and Slack integration, you can automate posts of new Contentsquare’s Session Replay sessions, error alerts, and survey responses.

Choose your tools wisely

The best product discovery tools make it easy for your team to collaborate, communicate, and stay on top of customer insights while bringing you ever closer to creating customer delight.

When selecting tools for your team, consider factors like company size, individual experience, budget, and product development stage.

And finally, choose tools that help you connect the dots between what users are doing, and why.

Want to go beyond surface-level analytics?

Contentsquare shows you how users really experience your product, down to every click, tap, and hesitation.

Get a demo
Get a demo

FAQs about product discovery tools

There are tools to help at different stages of the product discovery process; we recommend you organize your tool stack according to these continuous product discovery insights and activities:
- Behavior analytics and product experience insights
- Collecting customer feedback
- Team collaboration and user journey mapping
- Stakeholder alignment and communication
Keep in mind that some tools span multiple categories. For example, Contentsquare’s Heatmaps and Session Replay tools target the 'behavior analytics and digital experience insights' category, and our Surveys and other Voice of Customer tools target the 'collecting customer feedback' category.
The first step in choosing the right tool is identifying the product discovery outcome you want to achieve. For example, you may want to understand why a certain segment of users is slow to adopt one of your most valuable features.
The next step is to identify which discovery activities will help you achieve your desired outcome. In the example above, you may choose to collect feedback from this specific segment of users at the moment they encounter the under-utilized feature.
Finally, search for tools to help you perform the discovery activity. Using the example above, you could choose Contentsquare’s feedback widget or Surveys tool to ask users for their opinions in context.
When choosing between an internal or third-party product discovery tool, privacy is your top priority.
It's typically faster and less expensive to partner with a third-party tool over building a solution yourself. But look for evidence that the third-party tool has solid security and privacy features.
Contentsquare has always focused on protecting your privacy and keeping your data secure. We never sell your data, and you can request access to it at any time.
We’re fully compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) to enhance and protect your privacy rights.

11 product discovery tools to level up your process

Want to go beyond surface-level analytics?