20 Tools That Any Non Tech Founder Can Use To Manage Their Tech Product Development
20 Tools That Any Non Tech Founder Can Use To Manage Their Tech Product Development
How good it would be if you could have a video of every session that happens on your website. You could then check what each user does on your website and where they navigate. That’s exactly what SmartLook does. Smartlook provides a way to understand user behavior at the micro-level. The visitor recordings display what every visitor does on a website or app. The automatic event tracking shows how often visitors do specific things. Conversion funnels can be built to check conversion rates and understand dropouts. It also generates a heatmap for websites that gives data about where most people click, scroll, hover, and otherwise interact with websites. A downside of SmartLook is that it slows down your application with the added processes running in the background.

- View your customer actions in a live way. The platform is easy to deploy without changing your code.
- Providing invaluable insight as to how users interact with our website, landing pages, and sales funnels. It helps identify website issues on specific screen sizes.
The Google Mobile-Friendly Test is a tool that helps to find out how mobile-friendly Google thinks a website is. It measures how easily users can access, read, and navigate the site on mobile devices, gives a pass or fail result, and offers suggestions for improving inconsistencies if there are any. The Google Mobile-Friendly Test looks for issues such as flash player usage, viewport issues, horizontal scrolling, content scalability issues, unsuitable text or font, touch elements being too close, etc. that could otherwise prevent a website from loading quickly and evenly across a wide range of devices and signal conditions.
- Google Mobile-Friendly Test makes sure that the websites are mobile-friendly for Google and can be seen on modern devices.
- Very useful to make sure that your SEO efforts are not being penalized by Google.

- No need to recreate events that led to an application crash. Crashlytics automatically logs the error details and sends them to the central portal.
- The dashboard makes it very easy to identify devices or app versions that have been facing issues over a specific period.
- The go to platform to build/run up-to-date apps without crashing.
- Lighthouse is available as chrome plugin and provides actions to take to improve site performance.
- I find it to be the best tool to test progressive web apps.

- Similar to Lighthouse but more focus on loading speed for mobile and desktop websites.
- It provides insights on how to improve user experience, accessibility, and performance. Improving Page Speed can boost rankings on Google tremendously.
- GTmetrix ensures a fast load time of websites for clients. GTmetrix is great to know where the site is lagging and how to improve the site to load quickly. Some areas are more important than others and the breakdown from the report is perfect to prioritize the areas for improvement.
- The interface is easy to understand and use. The information that is produced from scanning a URL is well organized and well presented.
- You can quickly prototype full sites or small CRO changes with the added ability to update on the fly i.e. you can push changes live to anyone viewing live.
- Figma is a great tool to present work, concept and ideas with non-design stakeholders. It allows them to envision what their product could look like once developed, without having to pay for the development. It is great for MVP creation.
- The monitoring part allows you to track several pages at once and compare them side by side.
- One of the coolest features it has is that you can customize network and device preferences, so you can simulate different devices with certain network speed and test its behavior in various possible scenarios.
An alternative to SmartLook, Hotjar is designed to visualize how users engage with a website. It includes both analytics and the collection of feedback from users. With the help of heatmaps of visitor’s clicks and actions, their session recordings, and words from surveys and feedback polls, Hotjar creates a report of what people are using a site for, and how they’re interacting with it. The key feature of Hotjar is that it combines a range of essential analytical functionalities with user feedback tools on a single platform.
- Hotjar helps you make data-driven decisions about the website as well as your services and products.
- It gives a great insight into where users go mostly on your website, in addition to Google Analytics. The data can be used by marketing and website development teams to make adjustments

- Preference tests available where you can help the user navigate based on choices
- Click test and five-second tests are a great way to learn about home page and navigation usage
- Pretty comprehensive so one gets everything at one place. Especially, I love campaign management and competitor analysis.
- Custom reporting helps me get parameters that I want to track weekly in my inbox.

What I like about it
- Codegrip integrates with your development pipeline giving automatic updates on your Slack channel.
- You can customize your test parameters.
- There is a template for just everything and they are beautiful AF.
- Easy to set resolutions, screen size, and collaborate with others.
- Postman is very user friendly and also helps in developing, debugging, and publishing APIs. Postman helps developers to create a workspace and save all requests.
- It helps in creating API structures by allowing you to save responses for a callout request and debug all your APIs via postman, smoothly, and easily.
- The ease of testing the site over all the different browsers and devices. It is simple to use and the automation capabilities are outstanding if you are limited on time.
- It has several OS/Browser combinations and the ability to run headless browser testing. CBT is a value for money when compared to other comparable services.
- It is helpful in automating tests for web-based applications
- Simple code required to make most tests.
- Selenium is one of the best tools available in the market to match all your web testing needs. It’s free and virtually has no limit on the number of parallel tests that can be executed.
- Appium is well suited when you need to write automation tests with low costs. It’s very simple to start, configure and run.
- It doesn’t depend on the application platform and is portable to many programming languages like Java, Ruby, etc.
- If you have a team of developers and you want to increase the code coverage without breaking sweat, Appium is your best choice.
- If you want a full-featured suite of interface tests using a language other than Swift for iOS projects, Appium is second to none.
- Once you apply it to your events, it shows you which choices your audience are aligning with.
- Helps you track and understand user behavior and make important business decisions about what you should do more of, what’s working, and what isn’t.
- LoadRunner is well suited where you need to create several virtual users for testing an application’s performance. It’s one of the best tools for application performance testing.
- The monitoring and analysis interface is user-friendly, thus providing the users with the application of health and status quickly.
- AWS device farm provides you the ability to test your application or software on multiple devices with different configurations of hardware and OS.
- Almost all of its things are fully automated but if a tester requires manual interaction then it is available too.
- Device farm provides you the platform to deploy multiple devices with different configurations on the cloud and have your app tested in almost all OS and environments.
Since many tools overlap in functionality, Here is a summary categorizing the different tools.
Conclusion
I believe that these are some of the key tools that every non-tech founder must familiarise themselves with to gain a deeper insight into the technical aspects of the product they’re developing. These tools make you contribute further into your product development and make the right choices. For optimization and recommendation tools, it is very important to take the test results as “indicators”, not as an absolute checklist of everything that must be done. Some things may not be worth the effort. But at least they all give you a starting point to know where to start with and be an active participant in your product journey.
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