Question Page

How do you evaluate and choose the right tools for your team?

Saikat Paul
Asana Head of Product Operations • December 19

This is an easy one for me 🙂

I’m very lucky to be at a company where we can actually dogfood our product 24/7. As an operations lead, Asana is my tool of choice (de facto or not). I love the flexibility of the data model, the power of automations, and the ease of use. At Asana, dogfooding is a way of life- from culinary to sales to product operations, we are all in Asana every day.

But I’m not answering this question just to boast 😉. I’ve been in situations at previous jobs where we had to make tooling decisions. The primary questions I ask are:

  • How easy is it to adopt?

    • Watch out for complex usage patterns, a lack of help docs, or a general lack of intuitiveness in product flows

    • If you need to peer over someone’s shoulder to make sure they’re using the tool correctly, then adoption is going to be an uphill battle

  • How will it scale? 

    • Can the tool solve your problems today AND a year out?

    • Can it support your team size now AND when it’s grown two-fold?

  • Is the cost:benefit ratio fair?

    • What’s the seat cost and how much time will it save or how much clarity will it provide?

    • Tools should not make solely ops’ lives easier- they should make everyone’s lives easier

1248 Views
Top Product Management Mentors
Tanguy Crusson
Tanguy Crusson
Atlassian Head of Product, Jira Product Discovery
Laurent Gibert
Laurent Gibert
Unity Director of Product Management
Farheen Noorie
Farheen Noorie
Grammarly Monetization Lead, Product
Deepak Mukunthu
Deepak Mukunthu
Salesforce Senior Director of Product, Generative AI Platform (Einstein GPT)
Mike Flouton
Mike Flouton
GitLab VP, Product
Paresh Vakhariya
Paresh Vakhariya
Atlassian Director of Product Management (Confluence)
Tara Wellington
Tara Wellington
BILL Senior Director of Product Management
JJ Miclat
JJ Miclat
Zendesk Director of Product Management
Natalia Baryshnikova
Natalia Baryshnikova
Atlassian Head of Product, Enterprise Strategy and Planning
Reid Butler
Reid Butler
Cisco Director of Product Management