Why PMs Deserve Better Tools for Early-Stage Thinking

[
  {
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    "id": 267,
    "body": "As Product Managers, we're trained to think in terms of user needs, business goals, and tradeoffs. We’re expected to make sense of messy problems, translate them into actionable solutions, and collaborate with everyone from stakeholders to engineers. But here’s the thing:\n\nWe’re often handed **tools for execution**, not for exploration.\n\nJira, Trello, Asana—amazing for tracking tickets. Not so amazing for untangling half-formed ideas, validating assumptions, or working through the murky \"what ifs\" that come before the roadmap.\n\nAnd yet that early-stage thinking is where *so much* product value is born."
  },
  {
    "__component": "shared.rich-text",
    "id": 268,
    "body": "## The Messy Middle of Product Thinking\n\nEarly product thinking is rarely linear. It’s a back-and-forth of:\n\n- Capturing loose ideas from meetings, Slack messages, or user feedback  \n- Exploring potential impact or alignment with goals  \n- Collaborating with designers, researchers, and data folks  \n- Saying “not now” without losing good ideas forever  \n\nIt’s creative. It’s collaborative. It’s sometimes chaotic.  \nBut the tools we use? They're rigid and ticket-based."
  },
  {
    "__component": "shared.rich-text",
    "id": 269,
    "body": "## Execution Tools Aren’t Thinking Tools\n\nIn previous roles, I’ve spent hours hacking together “idea backlogs” in Jira or Google Sheets—just to keep track of things we *might* do one day. These systems worked… kind of. But they weren’t built for thinking—they were built for delivery.\n\nSo what happens?\n\n- Early ideas get lost  \n- Collaboration becomes fragmented  \n- Prioritization becomes a guessing game  \n- PMs end up spending more time managing tools than managing the product  \n\nWe deserve better."
  },
  {
    "__component": "shared.rich-text",
    "id": 270,
    "body": "## What a Real Early-Stage PM Tool Should Do\n\nImagine a tool that was purpose-built for your messy thinking phase.\n\nOne that lets you:\n\n- **Capture and tag ideas** without forcing them into sprint-ready formats  \n- **Collaborate asynchronously** with design, research, and data  \n- **Track progress of upstream work** without duplicating tickets  \n- **Tie ideas to goals and metrics** so prioritization is informed  \n- **Move ideas into Jira** *only when they’re ready for execution*  \n\nThis is exactly why I started building **Produmo**."
  },
  {
    "__component": "shared.rich-text",
    "id": 271,
    "body": "## The Future of Product Work Starts Before the Backlog\n\nProduct managers aren’t just roadmap machines. We’re connectors. We’re problem-solvers. We’re sense-makers. And we need tools that match how we actually think—*before* things become tickets.\n\nSo if you’ve ever felt like your best ideas were buried in Slack threads, lost in spreadsheets, or prematurely ticketed in Jira… you’re not alone.\n\nThere’s a better way to manage the thinking work.\n\nAnd we’re building it."
  }
]