Alex Kistenev
In today’s world information spreads so quickly that it changed the way companies compete. We, at the Standuply team, believe that for an online company the most crucial thing is the product’s quality. And therefore, one of the most important persons in a company is the Product Manager. Being fans of Slack, we decided to investigate.
What can Slack offer to Product Managers?
It turns out that managers can satisfy almost all their needs using Slack and its apps. Some of the apps are still raw, others are just plain integrations with 3rd party services. But there are already a lot of well made, useful products designed purely for Slack, for example Growbot, and we too are doing our best with Standuply to be among the best as well.
Here is our choice of the Top-10 👑 Slack apps that cover most areas of a Product Manager at work.
- Polly — for team surveys.
- Standuply — for daily stand-ups.
- Meekan — for scheduling meetings.
- To-do bot — for to-do lists creation.
- Trello — for team task management.
- Pipedrive — for CRM.
- Revealbot — for online marketing.
- Lucidchart — for mind-maps.
- Zendesk — for customer support.
- Intercom — for a live chat.
We have categorized all the apps and provided a brief description for each of them focusing on the value an app brings to an end user. The list is split into three parts which are published separately:
I. Task Management
a. Task management for a team
Some of the most popular task trackers already integrated into Slack are:
Also, there are bots which try to bring task management directly into Slack. These are just a few examples below.
It’s a to-do list and task manager inside Slack. The bot allows you to manage short-term operational tasks. With its help, you can quickly view and create tasks during a chat in a Slack channel.
The idea of this service is that after finishing a task each team member shares results using “/done + (task)” command in a Slack channel. So, instead of receiving tons of emails you can see the overall progress and each team members’ work results right inside Slack.
Price: free
This bot is PM’s digital assistant which creates Gantt charts and reports with the tasks split by time, project and assignee inside Slack. Also, it shows an approximate time needed to complete the project you’re working on.
Price: $4,99 user/mo
It’s a simple and intuitive /command-line calculator which can be useful for calculations without switching in and out of your Slack window.
Price: free
b. Personal task management
It can be used as a personal or as a collaborative task manager. Like other to-do services, Wunderlist allows you to manage your tasks in many ways. A well made old app is proven both on the web and on mobile. However, the service sends notifications to Slack only when someone has changed the status of the task.
Price: free for a limited version
It’s a simple to-do tool both for web and mobile. With fast scheduling and beautiful design, it allows you to sync all your tasks on multiple devices. Todoist has Slack integration just like Wunderlist, but it’s is quite limited. Using that integration you can only create new tasks from Slack, and that’s it.
Price: €28,99 user/year
listMe is a to-do bot that manages your daily tasks right inside Slack. With its help, you can put small tasks together. listMe is simple, intuitive and designed purely for Slack.
Price: $10/mo
c. Attention and focus
Pombo bot allows you to reduce distractions at work for better productivity by limiting your working intervals to 25 minutes. All interactions with the bot happen inside Slack.
Price: free
This is a Pomodoro technique timer inside Slack. It’s just another simple open-source app for a time management and is very similar to Pombo bot.
Price: free
It’s a multi-functional Slack app for managers which has an Eisenhower matrix. This method allows you quickly and easily prioritize personal and team tasks.
Price: free
d. Time tracking
It’s a task-based time tracking app that helps you manage projects, track working time and measure team’s productivity. TrackingTime has several integrations with other services. You can track time and see your team’s stats right inside Slack.
Price: free for teams up to 3 and $4.99 user/mo for larger teams
It’s a simple time tracking and resource allocation tool to manage how you and your teammates spend working time. HourStack has fewer integrations than TrackingTime though. Like with TrackingTime you can track time and see your team’s stats right inside Slack.
Price: free for individuals, $6 per user/mo for teams
It’s a simple time tracker mobile application. With its help you can report and monitor work time directly from Slack, generate and show your time reports to other team members .
Price: free
It’s a powerful tool for automatic report generation based on the time spent on coding. Whenever you are sending a commit to GitHub, Bitbucket or GitLab the bot shows your activity via a notification in Slack mentioning time spent inside your IDE or text editor (39 editors supported, 140 languages detected).
Price: from free to $9/mo
e. Mind maps
It’s a tool for creating flowcharts, mind maps, network diagrams, org charts, and mockups. With a lot of features and integrations, it has visuals to help you work effectively and discuss tasks and projects. Just type “/lucidchart” in a Slack channel to create a new diagram and invite team members to collaborate on projects. You can also share data directly to Slack from Lucidchart as well.
Price: from $5,95/mo for a single user
It is a diagram and mind map creator. You will receive a notification in Slack if your teammate leaves a comment, makes a change in your mind-map or adds a new team member to the discussion. It’s convenient when working collectively on complex projects. In addition to mind-maps, you can do wireframing, charts and much more with Cacoo.
Price: from free to $18/month
It’s an online whiteboard for sketching and diagramming for team discussions on technical tasks. Sketchboard has lots of features just like in Cacoo, however without mind-mapping. To use the service in Slack, type the command “/sketch new sketch” to start sketching. You can also add new users to your Sketchboard team, share your in sketches right inside a Slack channel.
Price: from $14/mo for 3 users
II. Agile Development
a. Backlog and roadmap management
It’s a road mapping software for managers with lots of integrations with third-party services. The simple and intuitive interface allows you to submit ideas to a backlog and create mind maps which is very handy for meetings, for example. Aha!’s integration shares all the updates with your team in Slack.
Price: from free to $59 user/mo
It’s a tool to collect ideas and notes that helps teams to plan and prioritize their road maps. Their integration sends ideas across Slack channels into a single searchable product backlog. It has a wide range of features that are worth checking out.
Price: from $45 /mo
This app is for visualizing project progress. You can receive weekly reports in Slack with completed tasks, tasks in progress and tasks in the backlog. This way you can set priorities better and keep the team on the same page. Screenful Agile has integrations with most of the popular task-trackers.
Price: from $29/mo
This app is for standup meetings but has planning poker feature as well (that’s why we list it here). It is useful for estimating the work complexity or the work load.
Price: free for now
This app is for polling via Slack. You can run a survey for any purpose and then view the results in Slack. It’s simple, convenient and designed purely for Slack.
Price: from free to $4 user/mo
b. Running daily standup meetings
It’s an advanced and yet simple tool to run automated daily standup meetings inside Slack. You can use predefined templates or make your own questions and in your language. Standuply allows you to run asynchronous or timed meetings and then delivers the results to Slack and via email.
Price: free for teams up to 3, from $9,95/mo for larger teams
This service is for daily plans, standup meetings, and accomplishments. Jell focuses on long-term goals and OKRs. It has great UI and Slack integration.
Price: from $4 user/mo
It’s one of the first solutions for running standup meetings on Slack. Presenting a handy way for team check-ins, Geekbot focuses on the asynchronous way of running meetings and does it very well.
Price: $3 user/mo
c. Sprint results evaluation and running retrospectives
It is a cross-platform error monitoring system. You can monitor and fix errors quickly before someone has pointed at them. Bugsnag sends notifications of such events in Slack so that your team is notified instantly if something has gone wrong.
Price: from free to an enterprise plan
It’s a tool for a website testing with quick tests to detect the most common errors, including JavaScript errors, missing files, broken links, and SEO issues. You can start Monkey Test It from a Slack channel by typing “/monkeytest http://www.your-website.com” and there you will get a link with test results.
Price: free
It’s a simple app for surveys and questionnaires in Slack. You create a survey, choose questions to ask with possible answer options and then interviews are run via Slack, where you’ll get the results as well.
Price: free
III. Meetings and Communications
a. Meetings management
Meekan is a scheduling AI assistant for personal and team meetings. The service matches everyone’s calendars, and quickly finds common free times. You can talk to Meekan in a Slack chat and it will assist you immediately.
Price: free, but they charge for the self-hosted version of Meekan
This is a smart team calendar which can be used for a meeting preparation. The bot in Slack sends reminders, follow-ups, agendas and does other things. It’s easy and intuitive to use.
Price: free up to 100 collaborative meetings
It’s an another tool for team meetings with project planner, team calendar, and to-do list. It allows you to visualize a list of tasks and helps to react quickly so that you can manage tasks in a more intuitive way. Its Slack integration allows you to stay up to date with all the changes made to the plans.
Price: from free to $39/mo
It’s an online whiteboard for brainstorming that helps you capturing new ideas during a meeting. It works on various platforms and allows you to create a new whiteboard from Slack just by using the command “/limnu slash” in a Slack channel.
Price: free (with limited options), paid from $5/mo
It’s a video conferencing app with automatic recording and transcription so that everything you say is saved. It doesn’t work on smartphones yet, but it does work on a desktop via a browser with WebRTC. You can invite up to 32 people to a conference. Type the command “/roundee” to start a video conference and view upcoming ones in Slack.
Similar products: ClearSlide, HYFY
Price: free
This zap converts speech to text through Automatic Speech Recognition in 44 languages, also it converts text to speech and translates text from one language to another.
Price: from $1,99/mo for Speechtrans
This bot creates manageable must-read lists for your Slack team. It’s useful, for example, in order to ensure that everyone is familiar with the results of a meeting. must-read is a very handy tool for those teammates who usually forget to do small but important things.
Price: free
It’s an online meeting app with screen sharing, audio, and video conferencing. You can create a new conference inside Slack and then share a link to all participants. At the specified moment, the app notifies participants in Slack of the upcoming conference.
Price: $18 user/mo
It’s a screen and voice sharing and recording app. It will help you to show finished work, for example. It can be integrated into Slack team so that videos are viewable by anyone from those team without installing any app. By the way, HYFY is cheaper than Join.me.
Price: from free to $5 user/mo
It’s a collaborative screen sharing app designed for team work, such as pair programming or discussion about design but it can also be used for the project demonstration. Screenhero integration allows you to share the screen with a team member by typing “/hero @username”.
Price: n/a
b. Knowledge sharing
It’s an idea sharing bot for Slack. Got a new idea for a promotion or an idea about the ongoing project? Write it down, right now in Slack — otherwise you may forget it at all. It’s a very simple and intuitive app. Also, your teammates can vote for the ideas.
Price: free
It’s a company wiki that helps your team organize and share important knowledge in one central, searchable, manageable place. It’s built purely for Slack teams. Tettra helps you to store project documents as well. You can search through wiki directly from Slack.
Similar products: Pingpad, Notion, Obie
Price: $5 user/mo
It’s a knowledge management solution that keeps your content and documentation up-to-date and accessible from the web. Guru’s Slack bot allows you to capture key knowledge shared in Slack with just an emoji reaction, as well as interact with all of your internal knowledge and documentation from within Slack.
Price: from $5 user/mo
Smooz create shared Slack channel between two independent Slack teams. It can be really useful to communicate with agencies and/or business partners.
Price: €6/ shared channel / month
IV. Customer Communications
a. Live chat and customer support
Like task trackers, many customer communication tools are integrated into Slack as well, such as:
It’s a multi-functional tool with helpdesk, issue tracking, and customer service support. Zendesk’s Slack integration notifies your team when a ticket is created, updated to “open” or “pending”, solved, and closed.
Similar services: Freshservice, NetHelpDesk, Reamaze.
Price: from €5 agent/mo
It’s a tool for measuring customer satisfaction using Net Promoter Score. The service allows you to create surveys within your email for measuring NPS score. Its Slack integration is a bit limited and only sends each new NPS response to a dedicated Slack channel.
Similar services: Promoter, Wootric or SatisMeter.
Price: from free to $49/mo for 1000 surveys
It’s a feedback service that allows you to identify errors in the product at early stages. Promoter suggests measuring Net Promoter Score, which is calculated by mailing triggered emails surveys. By connecting Promoter to Slack you’ll be receiving users feedback directly to a chosen Slack channel.
Price: from $100/mo
V. Team Management
a. Team motivation
This Slack bot promotes celebrating achievements and challenges that your team has performed. All the props are saved in one place so the whole team can view them. You as a manager are able to track who receives most praises from others using the leaderboard feature.
Price: free for limited version, paid features starts at $25/mo
It’s simple Slack bot to express gratitude to any of team members. HeyTaco! improves team’s atmosphere with the help of gamification. The service also offers a leaderboard, which means that there is also an element of competition, everyone can see how many tacos others have collected.
Price: from free to $1,5 user/mo
This Slack bot makes your team more engaging and brings up some fun. You can customize anonymous surveys and receive feedback from your team. Also, you can see analytics of the employee engagement via diagrams on a dashboard.
Price: free for a month
b. PTO management
It’s a staff leave planner with a calendar for days off and vacations. Timetastic helps you immediately see who is in the office and who is not. The app automatically posts a summary with the list of those who are absent in the specified Slack channel.
Price: free for 3 months then $1 per user/mo
It’s a multi-functional tool that has an autoresponder feature. If you go on a vacation those people who don’t know about it will receive a notification that you’re on vacations after sending you a message. You can schedule messages for unique or recurring future deliveries, assign tasks, annotate images, create simple polls right inside Slack.
Price: from $15/mo
It’s a reminder for upcoming holidays and about who’s out of the office that works inside Slack. GoCo helps your team to be aware of holidays, in order to prepare their time off or getting things done on time.
Price: free
It’s a tool to keep track of your team’s vacations and leaves. You get a daily list of absent teammates in Slack. Absence.io has a full Slack integration including approval requests and messages sent from their Slack bot to the users instead of emails. You can use slash commands for those purposes.
Price: free for a team less than 10 people
c. Document and expense management
It’s one of the most popular Slack applications in its niche which does expense reporting. Abacus also is integrated with various third-party accounting systems.
Price: from $9 user/mo
This bot will automatically add a print button whenever a file is shared on Slack. Any team member in a channel can use this button to print the file without leaving Slack. It should be mentioned that it works only with HP printers.
Well done, Hewlett Packard 🖨️
Price: free
Online file storage and collaborative document tool to connect Google Apps and Slack. It allows you to import any type of file from storage without leaving conversations in Slack.
Price: free up to 15 Gb
It’s a tool for collaborative work on documents, spreadsheets, and checklists. Quip is well developed for chats and discussing documents. Its Slack integration can be used to preview links to Quip docs, receive notifications when Quip docs change and create new Quip docs.
Price: $30/mo for a team of five people and $12/mo for every additional user
The service for creating commercial offers as a landing page. You receive a notification in Slack when a customer has opened a page, read it, accepted and made a payment.
Price: $29 for 3 users/mo
VI. Design and Content Management
a. Design collaboration
It’s a collaboration tool for designers and developers that allows you to save time with one-click design handoff, specs, and assets generation. Sympli works with Photoshop, Sketch, Xcode, Android Studio and Web projects. Its Slack integration sends notifications of design updates, style guide changes, and comments.
Price: $15/mo
It’s a browser extension to make screenshots, add notes and share them directly to Slack. This feature is a part of Getmarker.io service, which is no longer about the design but about coding. Sometimes it is easier to show an example than to write 100 words.
Price: $19/mo
You enter a command with the desired URL and then this bot delivers a screenshot of that URL to a Slack channel. It’s not a must-have app, but it may be useful in some cases.
Price: free
b. Prototype development
Well, you can use Cacoo or Lucidchart as mentioned earlier for this purpose, but here we’d like to list tools focused mainly on prototyping.
💡 We wanted to see the integration with Axure, but it’s not yet there. Who’d like to build that one? Here is the link to their API.
It is wireframing and design prototyping platform. Marvel’s Slack integration sends notifications of any activity like comments, updates to a specified Slack channel. The service also has apps for iOS, Android, and Apple TV.
Price: from free to $48/mo for 4 users
It’s UX, wireframe and prototyping tool. HotGloo makes it very easy to visualize the planning processes, build and test interactions with the modules of a website or an application. The service sends notifications to Slack of activities happened in your work space.
Price: $13/mo
You can use this service for wireframing, prototyping and user testing. UXPin sends activity notifications to Slack, and these notifications are more advanced comparing to Marvel and HotGloo.
Price: $19 user/mo
c. Content management
It’s the Slack bot from the super-popular service for email newsletters. You will receive notification in Slack when someone subscribes and unsubscribes from your lists and can see the status of a campaign.
Price: free, upgrade starts at $10/mo
You can find and hire freelancers directly from Slack with Shido. It can be used as an additional way to search for contractors for various tasks, a sort of Uber for freelancers. Shido claims they have a list of hand-selected proven professionals (eg writers from Inc, The Guardian, and The Examiner), who can be trusted.
Price: $39 per 4-hour task
This app is for recruiting either one freelancer or a whole team. The format itself is interesting, you send a task in Slack, and then a real person answers you and you both agree on the details via Slack. So you don’t have outsiders on your Slack team, but at the same you can communicate on tasks with others without leaving your Slack window.
Price: from $19/hour
Search for photos from Unsplash, Flickr and Shutterstock using Slash Photo. It saves time on switching between multiple sites, just type Slack command “/photo {search term}” and receive results right away.
Price: free
It’s a tool to search for food photos, content for a website or just an inspiration. If you want to get a random photo of something delicious, type the Slack command “/fridgg” or add exactly what you’re looking for, i.e. “/fridgg pizza”.
Don’t visit their website if you’re hungry 🍕🍝
Price: free
It’s a proofreading concierge in Slack that helps you to proofread emails, tweets, google documents or any other texts. Nurtz is always there and it’s completely human powered.
Price: free up to 100 words, then $0,02 per word
It’s a tool for measuring the efficiency of content marketing. You will be notified directly in Slack when someone puts a link to your webpage, when your article reaches a certain number of views (Google Analytics sync is required) or when your content suddenly becomes viral.
Price: free up to 20 articles
This integration allows you to subscribe to any RSS or Atom feed URL and receive updates directly in Slack. It saves your time on switching between windows but can be distractive.
Similar product: RSS Fox
Price: free
You can connect Slack to IFTTT to get a new entry added to an RSS feed, getting not only all the news in one place but also updates with fashion pics from Instagram, for example 😁
Price: free
It’s news aggregator if you want to to receive all updates in one place. It works in real-time.
Price: free
VII. Sales and Marketing
a. Sales and CRM
Here are the most popular CRM tools integrated with Slack.
It’s a Slack bot that promotes personalized sales and helps to sell more. Clari reminds you about a transactions, and occasions when you should contact a customer. It’s main use case is for increasing sales, but in general, the product is made for Forecast Management, Pipeline Inspection, Opportunity Management.
The founders admit that Clari is the most intelligent machine learning bot for sales on Slack Platform. Troops, what would be your response on that?
Price: on request
This bot is designed purely for Slack. Troops allows you to interact with your Salesforce account and delivers smart notifications to Slack. You can search for any Salesforce records, pull and schedule reports, configure triggers based on Salesforce data and celebrate wins with gifs via Troops’ Sales Gong.
Price: starts from free
It allows you to personalize customer messages to increase the number of leads. You will get notifications from Autopilot in Slack when a customer passes a certain stage in the customer journey (for example, a demo request). Thus, it is assumed that your team will be more motivated due to the greater transparency in the business processes.
Price: from $25/mo
This service allows you to monitor news and events of your key customers and partners. Attentive helps you to find one more reason for a contact.
Price: free, but limited to 10 profiles
It’s a lead-scoring based on in-app behavior. The app notifies you in Slack when an important customer signs up so that your salespeople are able to react quickly.
Price: from $249/mo
It’s a marketing platform for e-commerce and online marketing. Vextras connects to your online store and notifies you in Slack if something important happens. It has a lot of integrations with other services.
Price: from $9/mo
It’s an integration for your mailbox. There are many ways to use it but the main use case is for redirecting emails directly to any Slack channel (for example, all the emails for support may go to #support), notifications about the events (server not working, it’s raining, etc.). Only paid Slack teams can use it though.
Price: free, if you are on a paid plan in Slack
b. Analytics and monitoring
Google Analytics summarized in Slack that provides simple control over the actions and results of your own or third-party marketers. Arc sends a summary of daily, weekly or monthly data. In addition, it sends not only graphics but also text so that information is presented in a better way.
Price: from free to $9/mo
It’s a service which delivers data from App Store, Google Play and Windows Store to Slack. AppFollow helps to monitor and track your mobile app activities such as customer reviews, sales and downloads, ranks, keywords, updates and other metrics for mobile app promotion.
Price: from free to $9/mo
It’s a Slack bot for Google Analytics, Mixpanel, and Salesforce. Statsbot helps your team to see the data from these three sources without leaving Slack.
Price: from $5 to $25 user/mo
It’s an ad manager for Facebook and Instagram campaigns in Slack. The aim of the service is the advertising optimization. You get alerts about changes in CTR and CPC, view your stats or schedule reports inside Slack. Also, the bot can be used for Google Adwords as well.
Price: $10/mo
Mention provides simple real-time media monitoring and analytics of your product mentions on the web and social media. You can choose how to be notified, either from all the sources or from some particular one. You get real-time alerts and daily stats digest stats directly inside Slack.
Price: from $29/mo
It’s a tool for analytics and reporting for SQL and Python. You can receive a daily report in Slack (ad hoc analysis) based on SQL request and share insights with teammates members without switching to specialized tools.
Price: from free to $250/mo
This post is brought to you by Standuply. Want to overcome time zone differences in your team? Try it, and put daily standups in Slack on autopilot.
Also see: The Full List of 400+ Slack Communities
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