Product managers are at the center of it all — literally.
Sitting at the intersection of business, technology and user experience, product managers must master the art of juggling numerous responsibilities, from gathering customer feedback to managing stakeholder expectations. They must be top-notch communicators, organizational experts and technical savants, always ready to rise up to challenges — and find optimal solutions.
In other words, they must learn to navigate chaos with the nonchalance of a Zen master. And while this isn’t always easy to do, it’s far from impossible — as long as the right tools are in place.
As Clear Street has grown over the years, Director of Electronic Trading Ritesh Chaudhary and his peers have embraced tools that improve communication, visibility and efficiency, making it easier for them to drive the company’s efforts to modernize the brokerage ecosystem. Leaning on tools like Whimsical, Jira and Notion, they’re able to put their energy toward realizing the bigger picture without getting bogged down by tedious, repetitive tasks.
Time is of the essence in product management, making it critical for teams to find the tools needed to stay on track. At Teachable, Senior Product Manager Paulina Mei, takes a multifaceted approach to her role, combining simple tools with strategic processes to create structure and flexibility. For instance, by blocking an hour in her calendar for focus time, she’s able to assess her priorities and catch up on messages, while Miro helps her organize ideas into actionable insights.
Having tools like these doesn’t just make day-to-day work less tedious — it also leads to better solutions. With team members spread across the country, Finch Senior Product Manager Ananya Banthia and his peers rely on a strong toolkit to work together to ideate and identify opportunities. Using tools like Retool and PostHog, they’ve been able to launch products more quickly — and improve their work as a whole.
Below, Chaudhary, Mei and Banthia share more about the tools they use to mitigate chaos, the positive impact of these tools overall and the advice they’d offer to other product managers eager to restore order on their own teams.
Clear Street offers a cloud-native brokerage and clearing system that’s designed to add efficiency to the market while minimizing risk and costs.
What tools do you use to minimize chaos in your day-to-day work?
Product management at Clear Street has evolved with key tool advancements across the lifecycle. Evolving from a startup to a fast-growing company, we’ve adopted tools that enhance communication, boost task visibility and drive us toward modernizing the brokerage ecosystem.
During discovery, ideation and planning, we use Whimsical and Figma for workflow diagrams, wireframing and prototyping. I value Whimsical’s mind map templates for simplifying complex concepts and organizing my thoughts.
In the execution phase, Jira is essential for keeping our engineering teams aligned with Agile practices. Slack serves as our central hub, enhanced by Geekbot integrations that automate standups and improve productivity.
For project collaboration and managing knowledge, Notion is our platform of choice, offering a centralized space for seamless teamwork. We’ve also adopted Heap Analytics to gain insights into how clients engage with our flagship Studio product, enabling data-driven decisions.
As our tools and processes evolve, they keep us connected, aligned and focused on delivering value to clients.
“As our tools and processes evolve, they keep us connected, aligned and focused on delivering value to clients.”
How has your tool kit allowed you to level up at Clear Street? What important tasks are you able to accomplish by automating some of the more tedious processes?
At our firm, we have little tolerance for manual, repetitive tasks. Our mission is to replace the legacy infrastructure still prevalent across capital markets, which we can’t achieve by relying on outdated, labor-intensive processes. Luckily, we’re in an era where API integrations make connecting software systems simpler than ever.
We’ve integrated many of our daily workflows and tasks into Slack, which serves as our central communication hub. For example: Google Calendar provides seamless meeting reminders, GitHub and Jira send timely code review notifications and Datadog alerts us to production incidents.
One integration I’ve grown particularly fond of is Geekbot. This Slack bot automates daily standups, surveys and asynchronous communication, eliminating the need for traditional 15-minute meetings that often spiral into hour-long discussions. Geekbot streamlines team updates by collecting and organizing responses in a structured format, saving time and minimizing disruptions.
By leveraging these integrations, we not only increase efficiency but also create more time to focus our energy on innovating and achieving our broader mission.
What is one tip you would share with a new product manager who is trying to minimize chaos on their team?
As a product manager, you are at the center of the action, orchestrating the moving pieces that drive your product forward. Your superpower lies in maintaining focus on the big picture. Even amidst chaos, ground yourself and your team by consistently articulating and reinforcing the ultimate goal. Define clear, actionable objectives that serve as a guiding compass, ensuring everyone stays aligned and purposeful.
Teachable’s platform enables creators and independent business owners to develop and sell online courses, coaching services and digital downloads.
What tools do you use to minimize chaos in your day-to-day work?
As a senior product manager at Teachable, I rely on a toolkit that minimizes chaos and keeps me focused on delivering impact. My approach combines simple tools with strategic processes to create structure and flexibility.
I start each day by blocking an hour of focus time in my calendar. This practice, inspired by a productivity book I read years ago, gives me uninterrupted time to catch up on messages, recalibrate priorities and set a clear direction for the day. To prevent my calendar from being overrun with meetings, I intentionally designate certain days as “meeting days” and others as “work days” to protect time for deep, focused work.
Since we’re a remote-first company, I primarily use Slack for communication and Atlas for high-level project tracking, ensuring alignment on deliverables and progress. Miro is where I organize chaotic ideas into actionable insights, especially for roadmapping and prioritization.
For documentation, I rely on Confluence for long-term requirements and Google Docs for meeting notes. To keep myself organized, nothing beats Apple Notes and a checklist.
How has your toolkit allowed you to level up at Teachable? What important tasks are you able to accomplish by automating some of the more tedious processes?
My toolkit has been instrumental in helping me set clear, realistic and reasonable expectations before, during and after meetings. Establishing clarity up front has significantly reduced time wasted trying to determine if my team and I are on the right track. For example, Google Docs with standardized templates ensures meeting agendas are focused, actionable and aligned. Once we reach a consensus, Confluence serves as a central space for long-term documentation, so key decisions and next steps are easily accessible.
Automation has also helped eliminate tedious processes. Integrating Atlas into Slack for high-level project tracking makes progress updates readily available without requiring manual check-ins. These tools and processes free up my time to focus on higher-value tasks, like strategic planning and cross-functional alignment, allowing me to spend my time delivering a greater impact at Teachable.
“My toolkit has been instrumental in helping me set clear, realistic and reasonable expectations before, during and after meetings.”
What is one tip you would share with a new product manager who is trying to minimize chaos on their team?
Organization and radical acceptance are key. There are countless efficiency tools out there, but the most important thing is to find what works for you and your team. Just like the products we build, we are a work in progress, and it’s OK to iterate and refine your approach when something isn’t working.
Start with the basics: Establish clear communication norms, create a system to prioritize tasks and set realistic expectations for yourself and your team. Focus on building standardized rituals, like regular check-ins and structured planning sessions, that create stability in the chaos.
Finally, remember that what works for others may not always work for you. Test new processes, evaluate their impact and don’t hesitate to pivot when needed. Over time, you’ll discover the tools and workflows that help you and your team thrive.
Finch is a unified API for employment systems related to benefits, payroll and more.
Banthia’s Tools for Mitigating Chaos
- Communication: “Tools like Gather are great to bring an office culture for cross-geo teams. Superpowered is also fantastic for note-taking when you’re too deep into the conversation to remember to take notes.”
- Retool: “We move fast and often want to deploy something quickly. I can spin up internal tools using Retool without impacting my roadmap priorities, which has been critical to unblock our Success teams.”
- PostHog: “PostHog is important for us to quantitatively and qualitatively make sense of customer usage. Retention metrics in PostHog are especially interesting to me; make sure you set it up in a scalable way, and it’s worth it.”
- ChatGPT: “To no one’s surprise, this has been incredible in boosting productivity and extracting insights. One recurring use case is using ChatGPT to extract relevant insights and opportunities across my internal and external conversations, so as to point to proof-points to minimize chaos around prioritization.
How has your toolkit allowed you to level up at Finch? What important tasks are you able to accomplish by automating some of the more tedious processes?
The largest impact is typically associated with reducing manual busy work that can be automated away, such as updates on Slack and Linear integrations to consolidate my interactions — and those of stakeholders — into fewer tools. However, these tools also make us much more effective in ways that are difficult to quantify. For example, most of my team is spread across the country, so having the right tools to bring us all together to ideate and identify opportunities has been instrumental in our accomplishments over the last year.
“Most of my team is spread across the country, so having the right tools to bring us all together to ideate and identify opportunities has been instrumental in our accomplishments over the last year.”
Self-serve is also huge for us, so applications like Retool that democratize building tools that allow teams to unblock themselves are critical for us to move fast. This has enabled us to launch products faster, learn and iterate over time.
What is one tip you would share with a new product manager who is trying to minimize chaos on their team?
The goal of a product manager is often to make it impossible for anyone to say “I didn’t know that.” Most of the chaos in startups happens because things are moving quickly, people may not have the latest information or don’t understand why something is being done. Or maybe they just don’t know what their priorities are. This becomes much easier if you make everything easy to find and consolidate the number of different applications people have to use.
Try integrating your main form of internal communication, such as Slack, with your project management system, like Linear or Jira, and experiment with different workflows where users can retrieve and update information from one application. Reiterating these internal processes is key for adoption; it may take some time for the habit to settle in.
