Product Management Software Overview & Comparison

Product Management Software Comparison

Interested in finding out what Product Management software is available to help you do your job more effectively? Our clients ask us for list and comparison of the different packages all of the time. Following is a summary and comparison of the leading Product Management software programs. Note: there is also a write up at the bottom of this page of a Product Management Software panel that we ran for SVPMA.

If you would like assistance in choosing or implementing any of the product management software in this comparison contact us.

ReqDB from Requirements Management.
Requirements Management, LLC builds software applications dedicated to helping companies embrace a market-driven product development lifecycle. Their Product Management software solution is server based, allows for multiple user access and supports the 280 Group and BlackBlot industry-leading training methodology and framework. It costs $95 per seat, and there is a free trial that you can download to do a comparison.

Accept 360 from Accept Software
The Accept 360° platform is a comprehensive product planning and delivery solution that addresses the spectrum of business requirements from Executives to Product Marketing and Product Management teams and ultimately through the Product Development and Maintenance organizations. It is very flexible, and can be customized and adapted to virtually any product process, framework or methodology. As such it supports that 280 Group and BlackBlot methodology and framework. Accept 360 is a very powerful product, and can allow you to do "What If" scenarios based on resource and feature tradeoffs to see how it will affect schedule, profitability, major customer requests, market penetration and more. Accept 360 software is available as both a hosted ASP product and a licensed software product that can be run on your own servers. Customers can begin using the on-demand version for as little as $65 per month.. Accept 360 was the winner of the "Excellence in product management software tools award" given out by the AIPMM. Note: in full disclosure, the 280 Group is a partner of Accept Software - if you would like to learn more and arrange a demo contact us.

Product Pathfinder from Nihito Technologies
Product Pathfinder is a web-based product management software solution that allows you to quickly capture, organize and prioritize feature requests. It can be set up quickly, and almost everything (terminology, etc.) can be customized to match what your company uses or to support a framework and methodology such as the 280 Group's training provides. The basic version is $399 per year for the product manager and $99 for the contributors (with free read-only access for the rest of the team). The Plus version is $599 for the product manager and $199 for contributors (again with free read-only access).

Qpack from Orcanos
QPack is a process driven tool designed to mange the development process, end-to-end, from market requirements gathering and traceability, through product requirements, tasks and issue tracking, test management including test plan and test execution, defect tracking, and eventually the content of specific release and customer defects. Qpack supports the 280 Group training methodology and framework wit the “Blackblot Methodology Add-On for QPack™”, a software solution to write and manage market requirements using the QPack product development lifecycle management software application. Qpack is a server-based solution (no hosted version available). No pricing is publicly available.

Focal Point from IBM Rational
Focal Point is a product management and portfolio management solution which enables product organizations to deliver the most important and most valuable products to their customers; while balancing customer needs against the needs of the business. Focal Point offers the ability to collect and integrate multiple decision criteria from internal and external stakeholders and assess the impact of product and roadmap decisions, while continually validating the value of product investments. In order to have all dimensions of information, Focal Point captures market inputs such as win/loss analysis and competitive / market information, as well as customer details. Focal Point is web-based and available as a self-hosted solution, or as SaaS. Pricing is not publicly available.

FeaturePlan from Ryma Technology Solutions
FeaturePlan is an enterprise software solution that helps implement a more efficient product management process so that you can take market information and turn it into product requirements. It is a feature-rich product that is available as both a hosted ASP solution and a licensed software product that can be run on your own servers. Pricing is not publicly available for comparison.

Accompa is an on-demand requirements management software for product managers. It enables product managers to store and manage requirements centrally, and share it across teams in real-time. It allows cross-functional teams to engage in discussions on each requirement which are archived for future reference and are searchable. All changes are automatically tracked, and there is a wizard to create preliminary MRD/PRD documents. It costs $25/month/user for the first 10 licenses, and $15/month/user after that. A 30-day fully-functional free trial is available.

Product Management Software Comparison: The State of the Art
Moderated by Brian Lawley, SVPMA President
October, 2005

In October 2005 the Silicon Valley Product Management Association held an event focusing on “Product Management Software: The State of the Art.” Three executives from leading product management, requirements management, and product planning companies performed a show-n-tell of their solutions so that attendees could make a comparison. They then participated in a panel discussion led by SVPMA’s President, Brian Lawley. Representing the solutions were:

James Davies, President and CEO of Accept Software, makers of Accept Planner 3 (now called Accept 360)
Joachim Karlsson, Senior Vice President Strategic Solutions at Telelogic, provider of Telelogic Focal Point. (Joachim was the founder and former President & CEO of Focal Point , which was acquired by Telelogic.)
Andre Levesque, Chief Product Officer and founder of Ryma Technology Solutions, creators of FeaturePlan.

James Davies of Accept Software went first. Accept 360 is a modular Product Management Software suite that came from engineer’s frustrations at not knowing where various requirements were coming from. Accept 360 makes it explicit which requirements are committed on contracts, which are because of the competition, etc. Further, features have a value, a cost, and a market impact that can be analyzed more rigorously than the traditional P1 – P4 rating that is usually given in requirements documents. This makes it much easier to do portfolio analysis and compare development scenarios than manually running "What If" scenarios. Once the requirements are in the system, MRDs and PRDs can be automatically generated. The solution can be hosted or installed locally by module and is role based.

Next up for the comparison was Joachim Karlsson from Telelogic. Focal Point was first launched in 1998 in Windows. The web software version came out in 2001 and has a strong presence in Northern Europe with company leaders such as Volvo, Nokia, and ABB. Focal Point was acquired by Telelogic about six months ago and is now being sold globally. Focal Point helps the user start at the market segments and manage this down to features, products, resources, and finally the release. The product has a semantic search engine to help identify duplicate features in the system. It also assists the user in prioritizing the features by displaying them side by side and letting constituents rank which is the most important relative to each other. This data can then be segmented by market, stake holder group, customer, etc. Mr.Karlsson said Focal Point helps companies “identify and make a comparison of everything we could do, then decide what we should do.” The solution can be hosted or installed locally by module and is role based.

The final comparison was with Andre Levesque of Ryma Technology Solutions. FeaturePlan automates the Pragmatic Marketing framework and promises that you will spend less time on the tactical and more on the strategic activities. It was launched in 2004 and is 100% .net and sits on SQL Server. The next release will be fully web based asp/.net. FeaturePlan starts by organizing all the inbound sources of data including win/loss reports, call statements, incident reports, market research, competitive analysis, etc. From these, the user creates problem statements. Requirements are then written, and finally those requirements are grouped into releases creating the roadmap or “market release table.” The solution is fully integrated and is role based. Amazingly, all three vendor demonstrations worked flawlessly and showed the strong capabilities of Product Management applications in the market place. Further, all the solutions have many more capabilities than could be demonstrated to the audience or captured here in this article.

Although none of the vendors would be pinned down on specific pricing, you should budget $65 - $100 per user per month depending on size of installations and modules purchased. The only way to make an accurate comparison is to contact the companies directly and speak with their sales people.