Why PMs Deserve Better Tools for Early-Stage Thinking

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:

We’re often handed tools for execution, not for exploration.

Jira, 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.

And yet that early-stage thinking is where so much product value is born.

The Messy Middle of Product Thinking

Early product thinking is rarely linear. It’s a back-and-forth of:

• Capturing loose ideas from meetings, Slack messages, or user feedback
• Exploring potential impact or alignment with goals
• Collaborating with designers, researchers, and data folks
• Saying “not now” without losing good ideas forever

It’s creative. It’s collaborative. It’s sometimes chaotic.
But the tools we use? They're rigid and ticket-based.

Execution Tools Aren’t Thinking Tools

In 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.

So what happens?

• Early ideas get lost
• Collaboration becomes fragmented
• Prioritization becomes a guessing game
• PMs end up spending more time managing tools than managing the product

We deserve better.

What a Real Early-Stage PM Tool Should Do

Imagine a tool that was purpose-built for your messy thinking phase.

One that lets you:

• Capture and tag ideas without forcing them into sprint-ready formats
• Collaborate asynchronously with design, research, and data
• Track progress of upstream work without duplicating tickets
• Tie ideas to goals and metrics so prioritization is informed
• Move ideas into Jira only when they’re ready for execution

This is exactly why I started building Produmo.

The Future of Product Work Starts Before the Backlog

Product 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.

So 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.

There’s a better way to manage the thinking work.

And we’re building it.