5 Tools Every Project Manager Should Use
By: Miljan Simonovic
Tags: Communication, Project Manager, Project Management, Tools, Product Management

Communication is one of your main responsibilities, but there’s a whole lot more on your plate. You’re a key figure for every project. If it fails, the blame is on you. You’re the one who’s supposed to make sure it’s on time, organized, and within budget.

It’s hard to keep up with all that burden. Scheduling meetings, keeping your team members on track, crossing off milestones…

Luckily for you, there are numerous tools out there to make your life easier. Here are just a few to help you be the best manager you can.

Everyone knows by now that Google isn’t just a browser. It’s one of the biggest companies in the world, and it offers a ton of services to keep you on track.

Google Workspace — previously called GSuite — is a powerful set of tools. It includes Google Calendar, Keep, Drive, Meet, Chat, Office apps, and even more, if you can believe it.

As a manager, you’re always torn between meetings. Google Calendar is the perfect tool to make sure nothing gets overlooked. Apart from scheduling meetings, Google Calendar allows you to set reminders, tasks, and even goals. It’s integrated with other Google services, so it’s just about as handy as it can be. You can create an event directly from your Gmail. Your Google Assistant can set reminders for you. You can share notes with your team, and communicate within every app.

One of Google Calendar’s best features is the ability to turn different calendars on and off. You can look at just your own schedule, or you can check out your colleague’s and set up a meeting. This avoids a whole lot of back-and-forth emails.

This is another great tool from the Google Workspace shelf. It’s useful for anything you might need to jot down, like meeting minutes or quick ideas. You can also use Google Keep for to-do lists. Use bullet points or checkboxes to create tasks and subtasks, and cross them out when you’re done. You can also draw things out, or insert pictures, screenshots, sketches, and other media.

Just like other Google products, Google Keep connects to other tools. You can write things down straight from Gmail or Google Calendar, or get your Google Assistant to do it for you. And if you’re taking notes from an email with attachments, Google Keep will connect the attachments too.

Google Keep is great for your quick notes. But when it comes to longer documents, Slite is the perfect tool.

Slite allows simultaneous real-time team collaboration. It has a simple, yet intuitive, way of structuring documents, so you’ll never lose sight of any important info. This tool is great for product specifications or project documentation.

Along with standard text formatting and linking, Slite provides smart tables, checklists, emojis, code snippets, mentions, and more. You can also embed Google Map locations or Trello tasks, just to name a few integrations.

As a project manager, you need to regularly communicate with your team. Just as often, you need to keep in touch with clients and other stakeholders. You could go old-fashioned and constantly switch between platforms — or you can start using Slack.

Slack was built by and for programmers. It’s a powerful tool both for project managers and teams in the field of software development.

Slack divides communication into channels, so you can keep everybody in the loop. Clients and other stakeholders can talk directly with your development team. Slack gives them the right tools to express their opinions and ideas or to report a bug in an easy and direct way.

It offers numerous integrations (Trello, Google Calendar, GitHub, and more) so you can save time and focus on the things that really matter. You can also use bots to automate processes. The recent Salesforce acquisition proves that Slack is about to get even better.

Free, easy to use, and visually simple. Trello is perfect for everyone: smaller projects, project management enthusiasts, managers with less experience. You’ve probably heard of this tool before.

I find Trello useful for smaller projects with up to five team members. You can visually keep track of your progress, assign tasks, set priorities, attach documents, write comments, and a lot more. And all that for free!

If you’re willing to pay for a premium version, Trello gives you countless add-ons — or power-ups, as they call them. Those power-ups can help you manage agile projects. You can perform bulk edits and connect tasks, instead of doing everything individually. If you decide to ball out on the premium version, there’s a lot more you can discover.

If you haven’t tried Trello yet, use it for some of your personal projects. You can practice and improve your skills without too much pressure. Soon, you’ll be using Trello for pretty much everything.

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