Product research is a nuanced process that helps product teams understand user needs and build a product people will love. But the research process isn't as straightforward as interviewing a few potential customers and calling it a day.
Some of the challenges of product research are collecting unbiased data, implementing different research methods, and translating findings into actionable steps for product development. Enter: product research tools.
Whether you’re a product manager struggling to handle different roles, or a product designer who wants to make the research process more practical, the right product research tools will become your best friends.
This article covers:
9 tools to include in your tech stack for effective product research
Factors to consider when choosing a product research tool
FAQs about product research tools
9 tools to include in your tech stack for effective product research
Product research is a thorough process that brings you closer to your customers and helps you make user-centric decisions about the direction and development of your product. The more you understand users, the better you can build a product that meets their needs.
The right research tools complement each stage of the product research journey—from understanding customer needs to getting product feedback on a recent iteration.
Here are 9 tools to make your product research process easier, faster, and full of actionable insights:
1. Contentsquare: study user behavior and get VoC feedback
Contentsquare (hi! 👋 ) gives you rich digital experience insights to help you understand user behavior and get product feedback in the voice of the customer (VoC). Contentsquare is a great way to collect continual feedback throughout your entire product development process.
The best part? Contentsquare combines some of the most useful product research tools in a single platform:
The Heatmaps capability gives you an aggregated view of how users interact with your website or product, and tells you which elements make users click or bounce off through color-coded graphic representations.
Session Replay offers a play-by-play of how each user interacts with your product. They show you where people click, how much time they spend on a page, and what issues they face along the way that lead them to rage click or u-turn.
Contentsquare Surveys provides an opportunity to collect users' thoughts and opinions while they’re in your product. You can ask open- or closed-ended questions and offer rating polls (using NPS® and CSAT surveys, or another of our many survey templates) to understand how they feel about your product, and how you can improve the experience for them.
Interviews lets you automate the process of scheduling, analyzing, and sharing usability tests and interviews with your team. This essential product research tool makes it a breeze to
Recruit participants from a panel of over 200,000 volunteers or bring in your own testers to the platform
Focus on spotting key insights, knowing that the AI-powered interviews tool generates an accurate video transcript with the time-stamped notes you’re taking
Sync with Session Replay and Heatmaps to provide deeper insights into how participants use your product and why
💡Pro tip: product teams can use Contentsquare in every stage of the product research journey.
Use Contentsquare Heatmaps and Session Replay to collect data on how users react to your product and pinpoint issues they’re facing as they experience each page and feature. You can then use this data to prioritize product iterations or introduce new features to meet user needs.
After you've made the changes, use Surveys to get first-hand digital experience feedback from your users and assess the impact of your product decisions.
![[Visual] Feature prioritization survey](http://images.ctfassets.net/gwbpo1m641r7/zKdqi9ZuzMXQDseamqkpE/e302d0f9f56a311ee0d53cb317ecacc9/Feature_Prioritization_Survey.png?w=1920&q=100&fit=fill&fm=avif)
An example of a Contentsquare feature prioritization survey
2. Zendesk: gather user feedback
Zendesk is a solution for collecting, understanding, and responding to customer feedback. It allows you to
Connect with customers seamlessly across platforms, listen to their problems, and gather first-hand feedback
Analyze and monitor critical customer data with multiple integrations and functionalities
Create a response plan to address their concerns, and deliver solutions from a unified place
In the product research journey, you want to understand what customers are feeling right now. And the best way to do that is to have a conversation with them to hear their feedback and concerns about your product.
Customer conversations are an integral part of product research because they give you direct insight into your customer’s thoughts and challenges. It’s how you learn who your customers are—and how to keep them happy.
Use what you learn from your customers to introduce new and better features, manage iterations, and provide a better digital experience.
3. Make My Persona: define actionable user personas
Make My Persona is a handy (free) tool created by HubSpot to help you define your product personas.
Understanding your users and their needs is key to creating or improving your product. Once you've gathered enough information about them, creating actionable user personas is an important part of the product research process.
With Make My Persona, you can create handy fictional examples of your product users, including
How they’re using your product
Their goals for using your product
What barriers prevent them from achieving what they want to do within your product
You can even download your personas and keep them handy in your project management software.
💡Pro tip: are you just getting started with user personas? Place a user persona template on your site and start learning who your users are.
![[Visual] Product discovery survey](http://images.ctfassets.net/gwbpo1m641r7/hRf0vfZ2GdwTkmIUJkurx/9445867a32f6a99edc4e33a6b64ed05f/Product_discovery_survey.png?w=1920&q=100&fit=fill&fm=avif)
An example of a Contentsquare user persona survey
4. Productboard: research, prioritize, and plan product updates
Productboard is a product management software that helps you get your product to market faster and build a product you know your users need, by helping you
Centralize user feedback and use AI to turn data into actionable insights
Build a product roadmap that your team aligns on
Prioritize the right features, based on data
Centralized feedback management is a significant feature of Productboard that can one-up your product research process and make it more organized by collecting product insights and customer feedback (even negative feedback) across all your channels.
After completing this part of the research process, turn your actionable user insights into a plan to improve (or create) your product. Productboard’s roadmaps let you align your entire product team on what to do next, with built-in filters that display only necessary information to each audience in your team.
💡Pro tip: use Contentsquare’s Interviews capability to connect the dots between user feedback and your roadmap.
After each session, tag feedback by topic or request (for example, “bulk actions” or “onboarding pain points”). Over time, patterns will emerge—helping you separate nice-to-haves from must-haves. It’s a simple way to bring qualitative insights into your prioritization process, without relying on gut instinct alone.
![[Visual] user interviews](http://images.ctfassets.net/gwbpo1m641r7/7c46zJmxfZX3QWRc8y3A3S/76ccc1bd4b22ecf66805d94bc9d7d4f0/user_interviews.png?w=1920&q=100&fit=fill&fm=avif)
Contentsquare Interviews helps you prioritize the right features by capturing real product feedback from real users
5. Similarweb: determine market size and analyze the competitive landscape
Similarweb is a comprehensive web analytics tool that helps you with the next stage of the product research process: market research.
At this stage, you want to gauge the market size for your product, evaluate which competitors you’d be going up against, and evaluate the business potential for your product.
Similarweb allows you to
Get a view of the industry, including current size and historical trends
Analyze the competitive landscape, including your rivals’ marketing mix strategies
Learn the keywords and terms that your competition uses to market their product, as well as their search volume
The data you get from Similarweb helps you determine whether there is a market for your product and the market demand trajectory, so you can evaluate whether demand is going to last or not.
6. Airtable: manage your research data
Unless all your research material is neatly organized in one place, it's difficult to make informed product-related decisions, which can lead to delays or misalignment with visions and goals—dangerous territory.
If you want a dedicated place to keep your product research data neatly organized, Airtable can help: it’s like a spreadsheet on steroids, where you can manage your data in different cells that can expand into full-fledged databases.
Data management can make research analysis and implementation faster with detailed insights about your product, customer needs, challenges, and stakeholder concerns. Let Airtable make your life easier with:
A centralized space to discover previously conducted research, understand the status of existing work, and request resources
Build real-time visualizations and dashboards to help stakeholders understand timelines and project statuses
Build a repository that suits your workflow perfectly or pick from a variety of templates. You can structure and connect any type of data, not just projects and tasks, and connect use cases across the product development lifecycle.
7. Notion: manage your project and communicate your strategy in one place
Notion is a workspace from which you can manage the entire product research process. It’s a great place to keep your product research data, your wiki, your product roadmap, and…well, anything and everything useful, really.
Where Notion truly shines is with project management, though. To bring your product vision to life and act on your product roadmap:
Organize and view your project’s tasks into multiple views (timeline, table, calendar, and more), and assign owners, statuses, and due dates to each of them
Create dependencies and visualize how each task is tracking with a progress bar
Integrate with third-party tools to centralize all your work
8. Figma: prototype and wireframe product and feature releases
Building a product is not a ready-to-serve recipe. After research, you can’t build a full-fledged product and release it straight to the market—you need customer validation and feedback at every stage of product development.
Instead, you need to build a prototype or a minimum viable product (MVP) with only basic features to test the waters and see if your product vision will meet your customers' needs.
Figma is an all-in-one design platform that helps you bring your ideas to life with prototypes and wireframes:
Design the UI of the products or features you want to test based on the initial stages of your product research
Add animations to your designs to simulate clicks, hovers, and more
Switch from design to prototype and share your prototype in an instant
💡Pro tip: product research continues even after the product launch. A continuous feedback loop ensures your product continues satisfying users or, better yet, keeps improving based on their feedback. Product development, and therefore research, is not a one-time process but rather a cycle.
9. Optimizely: run A/B tests to keep improving your product
Whether you’ve already launched your product, released a new feature, or are still working on an MVP, consider running A/B tests (or multivariate tests) to gauge which version of your product or feature users prefer and which version converts better.
Optimizely is an A/B test tool that lets you test and optimize every touchpoint:
Run tests, uncover insights, and continuously refine users’ interactions with your product
Validate new features and deploy high-quality releases, safely and quickly
Design, implement, and analyze low and no-code experiments based on powerful customer insights without requiring a developer
💡Pro tip: the Contentsquare-Optimizely integration gives you deep insights from your A/B tests to optimize your users’ experience. The integration lets you combine your Optimizely tests with Contentsquare’s Session Replay tool to understand how users engage with and react to different versions of your product.
![[Product screenshot] Optimizely segmentation](http://images.ctfassets.net/gwbpo1m641r7/2pPFTyIw96fZEwDTGAt5XU/baa44e4ca08ef4a925290e7028d42276/Optimizely_segmentation.png?w=3840&q=100&fit=fill&fm=avif)
The Contentsquare x Optimizely integration lets you segment and compare users based on Optimizely A/B tests and variant groups they were exposed to
What factors should you consider when choosing a product research tool?
Every business has a unique product with different requirements, and investing in the wrong tools might end up costing you more time and creating more work than you signed up for.
But, how do you choose the best tool for your product and business? To ensure you choose the right tool for your product team, consider the following factors:
Size and stage of your company and products: a new startup with one product manager might just go for a single multi-purpose tool. However, an enterprise with an extensive product team may require a highly specialized tech stack. Consider the size of your company and where you stand in your product's lifecycle before you make your pick.
Features and functionality: understand your product team’s needs and identify gaps and potential problem areas—then find a tool that addresses these gaps and assists time-consuming processes. For example, an easy-to-set-up tool (like Contentsquare) helps the team collect user feedback about your product and directly send it to stakeholders for discussion—cutting down time spent on approvals.
Budget: your budget matters no matter how much you need a product research tool or how good it is. Before you even begin your research, understand the budget you have to work with and prepare a business case for any additional costs.
Usability and integrations: some tools are highly specialized and require a lot of technical prowess to navigate. When performing usability testing, consider who will use the tool and the degree of support they might need if the solution you choose is too complicated. Also, think about the time it’ll take to onboard new and existing team members.