4 ways to automate product management

Product management is a customer-centered approach to developing, 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 being outshined by the next bright and shiny tool.

But by definition, tasks like setting objectives, collecting feedback, and tracking product development involve multiple input sources and collaboration tools. This means there’s always the potential for information overload and slow processes that are difficult to scale.

By adding automation to your tech stack, you can easily connect your most-used apps to your team’s product management tool. Zaps—what we call Zapier’s automated workflows—let you scale manual tasks so you can focus on your more important work.

Table of contents

What is product management automation?

Product management automation is about letting technology handle the repetitive, manual parts of managing a product. Instead of spending hours updating roadmaps, sending reminders to stakeholders, or syncing feedback between tools, automation does that work behind the scenes.

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

It’s not about replacing the human parts of product management—like prioritization, storytelling, and collaboration—but about removing friction from the day-to-day so teams can make better decisions faster. When done right, automation becomes your quiet, reliable teammate that keeps everything (and everyone) moving in sync. Here are a few ideas to get you started.

Keep your team in the loop

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

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

Via email

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

Via 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 a new item is updated in your product management app.

Send product updates automatically

Most product management teams are active on social media, pushing notifications about product updates and prompting engagement on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. If you use changelog 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 ensure you never miss a chance to announce a new update or ask for user feedback, you can use one of these Zaps to create social or email posts directly from Beamer.

Track progress in project management tools

Even though they’re different, an efficient product management team needs both product management and project management tools. 

Product management tools help you research, set a product development strategy, and collect and integrate customer feedback. Project management tools, on the other hand, are more universal and focus on breaking projects into tasks, assigning tasks to team members, and monitoring each task’s progress.

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

Instead, use one of these Zaps to make sure no matter which project management tools your organization uses, everyone is on the same page about your team’s progress.

Pro tip: When you connect Zapier MCP to ChatGPT or Claude, you can perform 30,000+ actions right from your chat interface. For example, you could execute a command like this: “Summarize the key points from the last sprint review meeting,” or “Generate a project roadmap for the upcoming quarter using the current backlog items.” To learn how to set up 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 priorities without opening your product management app? There are several ways you can use automation to send information to apps like Productboard or Shortcut directly from your other most-used tools.

From team chat

If your team lives in Slack, that’s probably the place where a lot 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 zaps to send new messages fitting a certain description to your product management app automatically.

From forms

Collecting customer feedback is one crucial element of product management. Your team needs to gather information on 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 might opt for a form builder like Google Forms or Typeform, but you need a reliable way to translate those accumulated responses into actionable notes in your product management app. Zaps like the ones 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—all automatically.

From other tools

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

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

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

Make product management easier with automation

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

Connect your team’s product management tool to 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 this is just the start of what you can do. Visit our App Directory to discover more ways you can automate your product management.

This article was originally published in December 2022.