I want to share the services and apps I use on a regular basis to get things done at work. Maybe you’ll discover something new and make your work a little more enjoyable.
Product Awareness and UX
- ProductHunt — the go-to resource for staying on top of product trends, keeping up with new product launches and the evolution of existing ones.
- 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 with up-to-date market analytics and research. A corporate account unlocks detailed reports, but the free version still gives you access to the basics.
- Yandex Wordstat — helps you analyze user search queries in the Russian-language internet segment.
- 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 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 supports. Saves files directly to Google Drive and requires no registration or login.
- Canva — the best tool for creating visual assets; the free version is more than enough for most everyday tasks.
- Emojipedia — an emoji reference for adding a touch of personality to requirements docs and task descriptions.
Personal and Team Productivity
- Things — a clean, beautifully designed to-do app for Mac and iOS with minimalist aesthetics and great typography, perfect for design perfectionists.
- Ilya Birman’s Typography Layout — a keyboard layout that makes it easy to type proper typographic characters quickly (✓≈≠₽×↓−""). If you write a lot and care about how your text looks, give it a try — it’s a joy to use.
- Obsidian — an app for organizing notes in Markdown (.md) format.
- ChatGPT — my replacement for Google Search.
- Google Sheets, Slides, Colab — the baseline toolkit for any manager.
Rapid MVP Development and Vibe Coding
- Cursor IDE — a supercharged code editor 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.