Every product team accumulates tools. It starts innocently: a project management tool here, an analytics platform there, a design tool, a documentation wiki, a customer feedback collector, a roadmapping app. Before long, the team is spending more time maintaining their tool stack than using it to build product.
At the second Gathering of The Product Consortium, Ryan McCutcheon tackled this problem head-on. Drawing on his experience as a growth product manager at Sinch, Ryan presented a practical framework for auditing your product stack, identifying redundancy, and making deliberate choices about which tools earn their place in your workflow.
Original Presentation Slides
Download the slides from this talk as presented at the gathering.
The Real Cost of Tool Sprawl
Ryan opened with a provocation: the average product team uses between 8 and 15 tools in their daily workflow. Most team members can name about half of them. The rest are zombie tools - still active, still costing money, used by one person or nobody at all.
