8 Comments

I use airfocus on a daily basis and it delivers what it promises. I recommend airfocus to any product person! (and I'm not affiliated with them)

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Amazing, it really does look really, really good. Not affiliated either!

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Oct 18Liked by Alex Debecker

Thanks for the review Alex!

I've never used it... but after reading this I'll take a look!

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Thanks! If you do give it a try, let me know how it goes.

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Oct 30Liked by Alex Debecker

Malte here, founder & CEO of airfocus. What an amazing review/teardown. Thanks so much, Alex. Have send a private message re some of the UX flaws :) Keep up the amazing work.

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Thanks Malte, you & your team have done an excellent job!

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How do you think dedicated product management tools like Airfocus compare to more general workplace collaboration tools like Notion, or even more flexible tools like Google Sheets/Docs/Workspace?

In several companies I’ve worked with, we tried tools like Productboard, but adoption was low, and we eventually phased them out.

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The old adage is true for most saas products imo, they're really competing against a scrappy founder with a decent excel spreadsheet.

I've adopted productboard in the past and found it invaluable for _my_ side of the work, the product side. I loved it because it was a phase of the planning I could fully own, as opposed to Jira which had to also cater for devs.

Having experienced both Airfocus & Productboard now, I think the main value comes from the feedback collection & actioning. That's the real killer. For any mature product, collecting feedback and keeping it all organised is a nightmare. Even a spreadsheet gets messy. They both do an excellent job at organising feedback, keeping attribution (to the customer, the individual, the segment, etc.) and seeing the entire lifecycle of the feedback through to shipping.

Finally I'd say these platforms are also good if you're running multiple products/a product portfolio. Keeps everything in one central place, same processes, etc.

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