There are a lot of product management apps on the market today, and that’s great news. It means that as a Product Manager, you’re finally getting your long-overdue respect, with tools designed just for you. But this crowded market also creates some challenges, like figuring out which platform is the right choice for you and your product team.

In recent years, the tech industry has seen the rise of a new role that has quickly become a vital component of many companies’ success: Product Operations. This role, which sits at the intersection of product management, engineering, and business operations, has had an increase in demand as companies have recognized the need for a more integrated approach to building and scaling products.

Let’s dispense with this myth right away. If you’re a Product Manager and you’re worried that the new wave of “generative AI” tools is coming for your career, you can relax. Yes, software programs like ChatGPT can analyze gazillions of data points and even produce some clever insights. But successful product management is still very much a human profession that requires empathy, lived experience, and a passion for innovation and problem-solving. Can a Tesla drive itself?

While Craft.io is already the most complete product management platform available today, we’re always looking for more ways to build on that unique value proposition — and help companies centralize and streamline more of their work. With our latest design tool integrations, we’ve brought a key aspect of Product Managers’ and Designers’ workflows into the Craft.io workspace.

In product management, capacity planning involves coordinating and deploying your available resources according to the priorities of your product team and customers. Put more simply: Capacity planning is a process to help your company get the most value from its resources.

First, let us say that we at Craft.io are fans of Southwest Airlines. The company has been a technology pioneer for decades, and many of its ingenious business practices have forced other airlines to improve as well. Just a few of Southwest’s innovations over the years include: We’re not writing this to point fingers at Southwest Airlines. The company has gotten plenty of that already.

If you’re a product leader at a large company managing multiple product lines, you know you need visibility across your teams to ensure you have all the necessary information to make the best possible strategic decisions for the business. Every product organization has some process for managing their portfolio of products and initiatives.

You don’t earn both the International SaaS Award for “Best Enterprise-Level SaaS Product” and G2’s “Best Est. ROI” badge just a few months apart unless you listen to your users and continuously make your solution more valuable for them. But we recently won both of these awards (and several others) for our product management platform.

While Product Managers are responsible for the strategy and progress of individual products or product lines, product executives have a different responsibility. They need to set the broad strategic direction for the entire organization, deciding which key initiatives are most likely to maximize performance and achieve strategic objectives.

Happy New Year. If we were publishing this blog in any other early January, we’d end that statement with an exclamation point. But this is 2023 — and as we all know, the world is heading into tough economic times. Given how much difficulty organizations around the world are going to be facing this year, it just doesn’t feel like an exclamation-point moment.