airfocus offers a modular product management platform. It provides a solution for product teams to manage and communicate their strategy, prioritize their work, build roadmaps, and connect feedback to solve the right problems. Designed with flexibility in mind, airfocus allows users to customize the platform to fit the user's needs without disrupting the way teams works.
airfocus offers a 14-day trial now.
$15
user/month
Smartsheet
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Smartsheet is an online project management and collaboration tool. It includes automated alerts, instantaneous updating and sharing across team members, resource management, nested tasks organized in a hierarchy, a Gantt chart view, exportable and automated reports, and integration with email.
Airfocus is as well suited for large product teams that have several members working on the same product line as it is for a product team of one. For large teams, the collaboration tools that come in the out-of-the-box solution act as a huge timesaver. Frankly speaking, it will help eliminate a lot of resource-intensive face-to-face meetings. For individual managers, the visualization tools can really help organize disparate ideas into a cohesive product roadmap.
One flaw of airfocus is that it fails to live up to its ultimate utility because–like many SaaS products–it is dependent on the entire team, to include all stakeholders, to buy into the solution if it is to be a true one-stop solution for product roadmapping. However, there is no denying it greatly helps in getting teams a little bit closer to the goal of effective collaboration.
The Smartsheet platform is extremely similar to Microsoft Excel, so if you are familiar with Excel, you will pick Smartsheet up quickly. Even if you aren't Smartsheet has a relatively simple user interface, meaning just about anyone can learn it. One thing to note is that the interface is that some may consider the interface so simple that they feel the need to look for more robust platforms. If you have a small to medium project that needs to be manages in a central hub, Smartsheet would be a great fit. If you have a very large project, I might consider looking into more advanced platforms.
Sharing of finished products (e.g., road maps) via downloading or PDF docs could be a bit less high touch than they currently are. The product works best when all stakeholders have a seat but not all stakeholders (i.e. non-product team members) like to work that way, exporting options for them could be better.
Customization (look & feel) options are pretty limited.
JIRA integration only works for JIRA in the cloud customers.
Smartsheet set up is similar to Excel, yet when you upload an Excel file, things like conditional formatting are lost. Smartsheet has its own conditional formatting, and you have to reinstate the rules. It would be great if those would apply automatically once a file is uploaded
Some Smartsheet management and access rules can take some tweaking to work properly. This may be a case of offering more info to admins so they can apply these better and with more efficiency
Smartsheet has made my work life easier. Reduced my email significantly. Smartsheet and SaneBox have got me leaving the office with 0... Yes 0 emails in my inbox. My inbox would reach 150-250 email per day. Smartsheet brought that number down significantly and SaneBox took it the rest of the way. Do yourself a favor and check out SaneBox, too.
Smartsheet is very easy to learn. However, while I have been able to pick it easily, Microsoft Excel and Project super users that I have trained on Smartsheet get bogged down in the differences and can find it frustrating. Explaining the differences ahead of time and why Smartsheet is being chosen instead of a different software seems to counteract those reactions
They're a smaller company but they've always given great service when we rarely need to reach out. Pretty good online content but a bigger user base would help to produce more content in a self-sufficient community much as we see with Salesforce. To be fair we haven't needed their direct customer support very often. The sales guys are nice and not too pushy!
Work with the Smartsheet support team to get the best overall. If no one in your organization has used Smartsheet before, the support team will get things started. We had a couple of people who had used this product before and it was a great help in getting our framework together how we wanted to use it.
It's easy to use, it's customizable. It is ideal for managing multiple product lists, it is transparent and helps keep any work team centralized. It has an intuitive interface, special to track the time to our established goals.
Smartsheet is a dedicated project management tool that is built on spread sheet principles. When compared to Microsoft's own offering, Smartsheet came out on top in some areas like dedicated project management features vs having to build custom features to Microsoft 365. However when you compare them on price, Microsoft 365 definitely has more value than Smartsheet.
We know exactly what the impact/effort is of our projects, so we don't waste time on projects or features that won't drive meaningful revenue or increased brand affinity.
