9 product prioritization tools to optimize your feature roadmap

Prioritizing product features is a complex juggling act between what users want and need from a product, and the company’s wider business goals and resources. 

Without the right tools to quantify decisions and manage your product roadmap, even streamlined teams will struggle to prioritize the product backlog and keep everyone working toward the same goal.

While there’s no single tool to get you through the whole process, this chapter covers the best tools to identify, prioritize, plan, and launch product features.

Why product teams need prioritization tools

Prioritization is about numbers, not opinions. While making a decision based on a gut feeling might work sometimes, it’s not a scalable or repeatable process for a product team to build on.

Tools will help your team

• Collect and manage qualitative and quantitative user insights

• Display and share data with the product team and stakeholders

• Assign and compare prioritization scores objectively, without bias 

• Stay on top of tasks and deadlines in the short and long term

Types of product prioritization tools

There is no one-size-fits-all product prioritization tool—product managers need a range of tools to effectively fill and prioritize the product backlog today, including

• Digital experience tools: to understand how customers use a product

• Product feedback tools: to collect feature requests from customers

• Feature prioritization tools: to score and prioritize new features and fixes

• Product roadmap tools: to manage and share the product roadmap with teams and customers

By combining the best of these tools, you’ll see the bigger picture and learn where to focus your product prioritization efforts to keep your team on track.

Digital experience tools to discover how customers use features

You can’t prioritize new product features and fixes with guesswork. These 2 digital experience tools from Contentsquare (that’s us!) will give you the quantitative and qualitative data needed to prioritize product features that drive results, and see which ones need to be archived.

1. Heatmaps

Heatmaps give stakeholders and teams a clear, visual overview of how people interact with a product page. By seeing where users do and don’t click and scroll, you uncover the most popular and ignored features, and can add and prioritize bug fixes to your product backlog.

Start with the Contentsquare heatmap that gives you the clearest picture of engagement

Use Contentsquare Heatmaps to turn simple click and scroll maps into more powerful tools by filtering them by features like rage click, which instantly shows you where users keep click, click, and clicking in vain and getting stuck. 

2. Session Replay

Session replays give a clear picture of how an individual user experiences your product, helping you build a case for feature updates with data.

Contentsquare’s Session Replay tool in action

Contentsquare’s Session Replay tool helps you map the user journey from entry to exit and add much-needed qualitative data to the feature prioritization process. 

To help you save time, you can sort replays by Frustration Score, from very high to very low, so you can focus on the ones that are most likely to give you actionable insights and inform your product decisions.

Product feedback tools to collect input from customers

Heatmaps and Session Replay only show you what customers are doing passively. You also need to actively hear what users want and need from your product in their own words.

Here are 2 tools to collect voice-of-the-customer (VoC) feedback from users that can help inform your product prioritization.

3. Surveys

Surveys are the easiest way to ask users what’s working well or missing from your product. You can cut to the chase and set up a survey to ask users for feature requests or about their product experience.

An example of a Contentsquare product feedback survey Contentsquare Surveys lets you target users to get product feedback from a specific cohort (for example, paying customers instead of free users or users with a total customer lifetime value over a specific amount). You can also use page targeting to trigger a survey when a customer reaches a certain product page or clicks a button. 

Not sure what to ask? Use one of our free survey templates or let our AI-powered Surveys tool generate questions for you based on your survey goal.

Launch surveys in seconds with Contentsquare—get insights faster by cutting survey set-up time

4. Feedback widgets

Users can’t point at their screens and tell you what’s bugging (or exciting) them about your product. But Contentsquare’s feedback widget gets you close: users can navigate to our non-intrusive button on any page and send their product feedback straight to you. 

💡Pro tip: get more context by pairing Contentsquare’s feedback widgets and Session Replay tool. 

While viewing feedback responses in the Contentsquare dashboard, you’ll see a play icon if there’s a recording captured from the same session. Click it to connect the dots between what the user said (their survey response) and what they experienced (session replay) while using your product.

Feature prioritization tools to validate what to build next

Based on the data you’ve collected from heatmaps, session replays, and user feedback, you should now have a list of the product features users need fixing and want adding. The next step is to decide if features are worth implementing based on the effort it will take to develop versus the value they’ll bring. 

These 3 all-in-one tools will help you manage and prioritize product features in line with your product strategy.

5. Jira

Jira (from Atlassian) is an all-in-one project management tool that helps Agile software teams plan, track, and ship updates. Teams can use Jira to plan, prioritize, and track their entire product roadmap.

An example kanban board in Jira

Jira does not have built-in scoring for feature prioritization, but there are several prioritization apps in the Atlassian marketplace that make it easier. For example, Issue Score for Jira adds functionality to rate, weight, and prioritize features using popular weighted scoring models like WSJF (Weighted Shortest Job First) and ICE (Impact, Confidence, Ease), or custom formulas.

Features in Jira scored by impact, effort, and reach using Foxly app

Additionally, the Foxly Backlog Prioritization adds predefined and custom product prioritization templates to Jira and generates a priority matrix for an at-a-glance overview of how features compare.

6. Productboard

Productboard is a product management platform that allows teams to manage product insights, prioritize features, and build roadmaps all in one place. 

Productboard’s prioritization feature allows you to score features based on business impact

Instead of relying on standard product prioritization frameworks like RICE (Return, Impact, Confidence, Ease) or MoSCoW (Must-Have, Should-Have, Could-Have, Won’t-Have), Productboard has its own prioritization system that lets you quantify the value and effort of each feature and create an overall prioritization score (out of 100).

Productboard’s prioritization matrix

Productboard also generates a prioritization matrix so you can visualize the trade-off between a feature’s value and effort against each of your business objectives. 

7. Aha!

Aha! is product roadmap software for managing product requests, prioritization, and planning in a single tool. 

An Aha! product features board

Aha! Ideas is a feature request tool that lets customers suggest and vote on their favorite product updates. You can also import customer feedback from other tools, including Contentsquare, to keep all your product feedback in one place.

An Aha! scorecard for feature prioritization

Aha! has a built-in scorecard for ranking product features for prioritization. You can customize the scorecard metrics, scale, and weighting, which means you can use it with most standard prioritization frameworks or your own.

Product roadmap tools to manage and share feature updates

A roadmap gives a top-level visual overview of the product’s vision, direction, and progress. While all the feature prioritization tools we covered above also let you create roadmaps, these 2 popular roadmap tools are often used to specifically manage and share product updates, both internally with teams and stakeholders, and publicly with customers.

8. Trello

Trello is a project management tool from Atlassian, the team behind Jira.

A product roadmap, built in Trello (Source: Bluecatreports)

You can use columns in your Trello board to group new feature releases and plans so anyone can jump straight to the updates they care about. 

Trello is a popular choice for public roadmaps—have a look at others from Buffer, WordHero, and Elegantt for examples.

9. ProductPlan

ProductPlan is product roadmap software that allows teams to build and share unlimited roadmaps for individual projects or tasks. Unlike Trello, ProductPlan’s roadmaps have multiple layouts so you can view tasks in a calendar, list, or table. 

A calendar-view roadmap built in ProductPlan

ProductPlan can also be used to share public roadmaps, such as this accessibility roadmap from the University of Birmingham.

FAQs about product prioritization tools