I want to share the services and apps I regularly use to get work done. Maybe you’ll discover something new and make your day-to-day a little smoother.
Product Awareness and UX
- ProductHunt — the go-to resource for building product intuition. It keeps you up to speed on new product launches and how existing ones are evolving.
- UserOnboard — a library of detailed UX teardowns of popular products like Gmail, Instagram, Apple Music, Netflix, and more.
Research and A/B Testing
- Statista — a knowledge base packed with up-to-date market analytics and research. A corporate account unlocks detailed reports, but even the free version gives you access to the basics.
- Yandex Wordstat — useful for analyzing user search queries in the Russian-language web.
- ResearchGate — a massive library of academic papers on virtually any topic.
- Evan’s Awesome A/B Tools — one of the oldest and most popular online tools for planning and analyzing A/B tests: sample size estimation and experiment result evaluation.
- GoodUI — a pattern library featuring A/B tests and breakdowns of their results.
Diagrams, Flowcharts, and Graphics
- Miro — the de facto standard for visual collaboration.
- Mermaid — a tool for generating diagrams from plain text descriptions (code). Integrates with a wide range of modern wiki systems: Notion, Google Docs, Confluence.
- Draw.io — a simple and convenient tool for creating more complex diagrams than Mermaid can handle. Lets you save files directly to Google Drive with no registration or login required.
- Canva — the best tool for creating visual assets. The free version is more than enough for most straightforward tasks.
- Emojipedia — an emoji reference for adding a little personality to requirements and task descriptions.
Personal and Team Productivity
- Things — a clean, beautifully designed to-do app for Mac and iOS. Minimalist UI, great typography — a treat for design perfectionists.
- Ilya Birman’s Typography Layout — a keyboard layout for writing polished text and typing the right characters quickly (✓≈≠₽x↓−""). If you write a lot and care about how your text looks, give Birman’s layout a try — it’s a genuine pleasure to use.
- Obsidian — a note-taking app built around Markdown (.md) files.
- ChatGPT — my replacement for Google Search.
- Google Sheets, Slides, Colab — the bare essentials for any product manager.
Rapid MVP Development and Vibe Coding
- Cursor IDE — a code editor on steroids that lets you build apps and services with minimal programming knowledge, incredibly fast.
- GitHub / GitHub Pages — deploy static sites to production quickly and for free.
- Vercel — deploy more complex services to production quickly and for free.