What’s the hardest part about product management? Well, in my humble opinion, it is about “What to build next that my customers actually will use, love, and care about?” — Airfocus helps you exactly with that, and that’s why I wrote this Airfocus review for you.
If you are a product manager, you already know how crucial customer discovery is to understand your target market’s needs before fully developing your product. You must also centralize client feedback from multiple channels to hear the customer’s voice. After that, depending on customer needs, company objectives, and team restrictions, the product prioritization strategy determines which products or features you should concentrate on first.
While both of these tasks are often easier said than done, several product management and prioritization tools can help you. But very few of those come with the flexible, module-based structure that airfocus offers.
In this article, I’ll introduce airfocus, which many product managers may find to be a real hidden treasure. Read on to get a solid airfocus review, including the platform’s main features, pricing, advantages, disadvantages, and things I liked most.
First, complete disclosure: If you click on some of the links in this article, I may get affiliate commissions (at no extra cost to you!). The company didn’t pay me to write this review; I personally tested the tool and support it regardless.
Table of Content
airfocus Review: Overview
airfocus is the first modular platform for product management. It makes constructing dynamic and strategic lean roadmaps simple, allowing you to concentrate on the big picture with team objectives that address the right concerns. By setting up distinct priorities connected to your goals and objectives, you can use airfocus to turn decision-making into an open, cooperative process.
You can use airfocus to find insightful data, combine feedback from various channels, and create and use your preferred prioritizing technique. Users can lower background noises and organize inputs as they come in.
airfocus secures all connections between its servers and client browsers using the industry-standard Transport Layer Security protocol. Moreover, users can integrate airfocus with their preferred applications, like Jira, Trello, Azure DevOps, Zapier, Clubhouse, Asana, and others.
With a wide range of helpful integrations, modules for custom product stacks, and customizable templates, airfocus users can continue using their favorite development tools under one handy platform.
airfocus Review: Key Features
airfocus can be a one-stop solution for all your roadmapping and prioritization needs. Let us take a look at some of its defining features.
Roadmaps
With its clear product roadmaps, airfocus enables you to unite everyone around your vision. You can create outcome-driven roadmaps, avoid the feature factory, and share customized roadmaps with your teams.
The user-friendly roadmap builder makes it simple to create attractive roadmaps in various formats that you can customize to your needs. The release and timeline views put strategies into practice and let you see the dependencies between your items.
airfocus roadmaps also allow you to express your sprint plans flawlessly, plan around objectives and milestones and distribute customized roadmaps to various audiences via secure URLs and exports.
With airfocus, you can create a product portfolio by combining different roadmaps, which provide a better picture of multiple teams’ activities and encourage cross-functional collaboration.
Additionally, airfocus allows you to define and prioritize several degrees of product hierarchies. You can link hierarchies together, design your own unique workflow for each level, and keep the team aligned.
You can start road mapping in just a few minutes with one of the many ready-made templates that airfocus provides, such as outcome-based, technology-focused, or objective-led roadmaps.
Prioritization
You can confidently prioritize using airfocus and find the right solutions. Using scoring frameworks, Priority Poker, user insights, and OKRs, you can organize your roadmap and backlog according to a clear product strategy.
With the support of personalized scoring frameworks from airfocus, teams can unify prioritization workflows and make better product decisions. With its built-in, customized workflows, the tool enables you to prioritize your strategy, discovery, and execution.
airfocus provides you with a portfolio-wide perspective of your activities to understand the priorities of all your cross-functional teams. By identifying what brings you the greatest value, you can visualize your key projects and opportunities, quick wins, and time-wasters to lower the chance of business failure.
The Priority Poker, an interactive and cooperative tool for bringing stakeholders together to reach a consensus on product priorities, is another helpful feature. Additionally, you can handle negotiating meetings more skillfully and determine the most requested ideas for incorporating consumer feedback when prioritizing problems with airfocus. The pre-made prioritization templates offered by airfocus include Value vs. Effort prioritizing, RICE prioritization, and more.
Branded Portal
By presenting your roadmaps, plans, and releases on a dedicated portal, you can engage your audiences with the help of airfocus’ branded portals function. This makes it simple for you to get input and verify new ideas. Moreover, you can create a branded customer-facing website or a portal that matches your brand where you can share product work, ideas, new launches, and more.
By making it simple for customers to contribute suggestions and ideas for new products, airfocus portals help close the gap between your product team and your audience. Additionally, you can run experiments, analyze your ideas, test and validate ideas with the community, and improve your discovery process by asking consumers for comments regularly.
All of your portal input is centralized by airfocus to produce valuable insights. You can quickly inform your customers about your product and their requests to close the feedback loop.
Centralized Feedback
The centralized feedback feature of airfocus is another noteworthy aspect. This aids in gathering, consolidating, and organizing customer input from your channels and locating valuable information for your product strategy. By combining input from email, chat, support, and other channels in one well-organized inbox, airfocus ensures that no data is lost.
By connecting consumer input to ideas, opportunities, and features in your backlog, airfocus enables you to produce actionable insights. In addition to keeping track of frequently requested ideas, you can manage feedback using a customized set of workflows. Additionally, airfocus’ branded portals assist you and your team in segmenting, organizing, and visualizing the gathered input in ways that make the most sense.
Flexible Framework
Besides its four key features, airfocus offers a host of functionalities that make the module-based platform much more flexible.
The interface is intuitive with drag-and-drop elements for roadmaps, kanban boards, and Gantt charts. Gantt timeline charts also help to manage your deadlines and plan your priorities visually and interactively. You can also assign custom labels and groups to items to better organize your projects.
Other than that, airfocus also lets you filter by label, group, assignee, or lane to see what’s relevant to your search. Lastly, airfocus makes team sharing and collaboration easier with the option to align your whole team with current goals and activities in a single click.
airfocus Review: Pricing
airfocus offers four subscription plans: Essential, Advanced, Pro, and Enterprise. All of the packages come with a 14-day, card-free trial.
- Essential Plan: At $19 per month, this plan gives you one workspace, product backlog management with custom views and fields, and the option to create and share tables, boards, and timelines. Besides letting you share roadmaps and views with unlimited users, the plan also offers multiple users and role permissions, encryption in transit & at rest, as well as integration with Zapier.
- Advanced Plan: At $59 per month, the Advanced Plan is suitable for experienced product teams designing their own stack. Beyond the features of the Essential plan, the Advanced plan comes with additional perks like unlimited workspaces, advanced prioritization frameworks, and priority charts.
You also get dev tool integrations like Trello, Jira Cloud, Asana, MS Planner, GitHub, etc. Besides integrating with feedback tools (like Intercom and Slack), the Advanced plan also offers a branded portal, custom product hierarchies, feedback forms, and more. - Pro Plan: At $109 per month, the Pro plan lets you get the most out of airfocus’ modularity and flexibility. You get additional features like Priority Poker, workspace collaboration, portfolio view, unlimited branded portals, OKRS goal setting, invoice pay, and integrations with Jira Server and Azure DevOps.
- Enterprise Plan: With custom pricing, the Enterprise plan is tailored towards the user’s specific needs. The plan includes advanced security and privacy, SAML SSO, a designated customer success manager, training sessions, priority support, and more.
Pros
- Powerful prioritization framework with customizable scoring board algorithm (Advanced Plan and above)
- Branded portals to build and maintain customer engagement
- Prioritization charts with interactive, customizable prioritization matrix
- Efficient real-time collaboration with Priority Poker voting options
- Timeline, Kanban, and Gantt chart for roadmapping with a drag-and-drop interface
- Advanced real-time sharing with unlimited views and export options in multiple formats
- Access controls to maintain privacy in individual/group sharing
- Secure password storage and transmission with PBKDF2-based hashing algorithm and industry-standard Transport Layer Security for servers
Cons
- Most useful features (like Priority Poker, branded portals, custom product hierarchies, etc.) are only accessible with upper-tier plans
- No free/freemium version is available
airfocus Review: Who is It For?
While airfocus is best suited for mid-market product managers, anyone can start using the tool, starting with a small plan and expanding gradually. The application is also ideal for solopreneurs, new businesses, startups, and teams that must streamline their workflow while working on several projects simultaneously.
airfocus Review: 3 Things I Love About airfocus
There are quite a few things I liked about airfocus, but my top 3 picks would be:
- Module-based Platform: airfocus has a complete suite of tools, features, and apps to help teams manage their products effectively and build unique product stacks. The needs of every product and product manager might not be the same, and as such, each manager might require a different tool.
airfocus’s advanced modularity makes it easier for users to start with the right tool they need to solve their problems. While some may need more of a robust roadmapping tool, others may emphasize prioritization and feedback centralization. With airfocus, it’s possible to start with precisely what you need and expand on it gradually. - Customizable Framework: While most alternatives require the users to adjust to the platform, airfocus does it in reverse. Along with offering a variety of pre-made templates and apps that can all be customized to meet your specific product management needs, airfocus also offers significant customization possibilities for roadmapping, scoreboards, branded portals, and other features.
- Excellent Customer Support: airfocus’s best-in-class customer support is another praiseworthy aspect. airfocus’s customer support is designed to empower product management teams at scale, ensuring a response time of fewer than 10 minutes.
The platform also offers product strategy consultants onboarding, extensive resources and documentation, free webinars, dedicated training, and even a designated customer support manager for Enterprise users.
There’s a lot to like and not much to nitpick about airfocus. Despite all that I liked about the end-to-end product management tool, there’s still one thing I wished was done differently. Besides the absence of a free or freemium version, airfocus’ differentiating features, like Priority Poker, branded portals, etc., are only accessible with the pricier subscription plans.
Final Verdict
airfocus is a tool I’d recommend trying out. While other alternatives focus on only roadmapping, prioritizing, or feedback collection, airfocus presents itself as an end-to-end solution for product managers. Instead of using multiple tools for multiple purposes, airfocus’ flexible module-based platform is tailored toward your specific needs.
So whether you need all of airfocus’ features or just want to get started with one module and expand, it’s worth giving it a try. The best case scenario is that you’ll find a hidden gem of a product management tool, and if it doesn’t click, you can always walk away after the 14-day trial (with no credit card info required!)
Disclaimer: If you click on some of the links in this article, I may receive affiliate compensation. However, the tools and services I review are some of the best ones I’ve tried, and I support them personally without being paid by the companies to do so. To find out more, head over to my privacy policy & affiliate disclosure.
P.S. Check out my podcast (which already has 76 episodes and more on the way!) if you want to learn about actionable growth marketing from actual marketers discussing their own strategies and business development tips.