Product Pick’Em 2025: The Ultimate Startup Showdown

The biggest showdown in product management is BACK—and this time, it’s all about the most promising startups.

Welcome to Product Pick’Em 2025, where the best emerging product tool startups go head-to-head in a bracket-style competition, and YOU decide which ones rise to the top via our LinkedIn polls on the Productside page.

Forget the hype. Forget the flashy marketing. Real product pros are casting their votes for the tools they actually use and believe in—one round at a time—until we crown the ultimate startup champion.

How It Works

Follow us on LinkedIn to get in on the action!

• March 21 (12:00-12:30pm EST): LinkedIn Live Tip-off event — Meet the contenders, hear expert predictions, and get ready to vote

• March 25: Round 1 voting begins— Cast your vote on LinkedIn to help your favorite startups advance.

• April 4: The final battle—only one startup will take the crown.

Each round, the lowest-scoring tools get eliminated, and the best move forward. Who makes it to the finals? That’s up to YOU.

The Categories: Who Will Reign Supreme?

Four categories. Four winners. One final champion.

Analytics Which platform gives teams the clearest insights without drowning them in dashboards?

Customer Feedback Which tool turns user insights into real product decisions?

Work Management Which platform actually helps teams get things done instead of just adding to the chaos?

Wildcard Wonders Which tool takes on unique product challenges—from user interfaces to special-purpose workflows—without the frustration?

Meet the Contenders

These are the platforms changing the way product teams operate. Let’s meet the competitors:

Analytics Bracket

• Metabase – Open-source BI tool that makes self-service analytics easy for teams. Metabase serves up data insights without burying you in code. It’s the self-serve analytics platform that transforms raw numbers into intuitive dashboards. If you’re fed up with complicated SQL queries and subpar reporting tools, Metabase is your breath of fresh air. Point, click, and watch your data come to life. Their focus on open-source flexibility means you can tweak Metabase for unique workflows—no monstrous licensing fees attached.

• Capitol AI – AI-powered storytelling engine that turns raw data into insightful narratives. Capitol AI aims to streamline complex data sets into chat-style intelligence. Think of it as a personal analyst that cuts through the clutter in seconds. Instead of building countless pivot tables, let their AI engine handle the heavy lifting. You’ll free up time to spend on actual product strategy—imagine that. Capitol AI’s real magic is in machine learning-driven trendspotting—perfect for zeroing in on anomalies before they become full-blown issues.

• Circleback – AI meeting assistant that transcribes, summarizes, and automates follow-ups. Circleback collates feedback loops and merges them with analytics, giving you a 360° view of both product usage and sentiment. Data is one thing, but gleaning direct quotes and user-driven insights is another. Circleback fuses both to keep you honest about what’s really happening. The platform’s real-time performance dashboards highlight not just what’s happening, but why it’s happening—so you can course-correct on the fly.

• Laminar – The ultimate observability platform for AI products, tracking every model move. Laminar embraces AI-driven data orchestration for product teams. Picture a streamlined pipeline where your data flows from raw sources straight to polished insights. Instead of juggling multiple data tools, you get a single environment for ingestion, cleaning, and analysis. One home for all your dashboards—less friction, more clarity. Their auto-discovery feature zeroes in on hidden correlations you never thought to check, letting you unearth product gold with minimal fuss.

Customer Feedback Bracket

• Maze – The go-to platform for continuous user testing and product discovery. Maze transforms user testing from an exhaustive gauntlet into quick sprints, so you can validate designs and features in hours, not weeks. Shave off endless design guesswork—Maze helps you gather user reactions on prototypes almost instantly. No more guess-and-hope; you’ll know if a concept resonates. Their “continuous discovery” toolkit auto-organizes responses into actionable themes, cutting your analytics busywork in half.

• Dovetail – A research repository powerhouse that organizes and analyzes qualitative data. Dovetail is your central hub for user research, making it easy to highlight quotes, tag themes, and compile user evidence. When you’re wrangling hundreds of interview notes, Dovetail’s robust tagging and search ensures no critical insight slips through the cracks. The recently launched “Magic summarize” feature distills hours of interviews into crisp bullet points—faster retrospective, deeper feedback.

• Great Question – A research workflow tool that streamlines recruitment, scheduling, and insights. Great Question orchestrates surveys, interviews, and all forms of feedback in one place, letting you manage your entire user research pipeline from a single dashboard. Product leaders can slash scheduling headaches while simultaneously collecting richer user context for better decision-making. The platform’s native scheduling integration pings participants automatically and even suggests times based on historical availability—yes, user engagement can be that painless.

• Lookback – The ultimate usability testing tool, letting teams watch and learn from real users. Lookback specializes in video-driven user testing, capturing real-time screens, voices, and even facial expressions. Think you know your user? Watch them actually navigate your design, and you’ll see exactly where confusion sets in. Their collaborative observation mode lets your product squad gather in a virtual “watch party,” with in-chat commentary—so those micro “aha” moments never slip away.

Work Management Bracket

• Perplexity AI – The AI-powered knowledge engine that answers complex questions in seconds. It retrieves real-time information, summarizes key insights, and organizes knowledge with cited sources—so teams can make informed decisions faster. Product managers spend hours digging through Slack, Google Docs, and research reports for the right data. Perplexity cuts through the noise, delivering concise, trustworthy answers in seconds—and linking back to the sources for easy validation. A Thread is a full back-and-forth conversation with Perplexity. It includes your initial question, any follow-up queries, and all of Perplexity’s responses.

• Attio – A next-gen CRM that ditches the bloat and adapts to how your team actually works. It automatically tracks interactions, organizes contacts, and lets teams build custom pipelines—without the rigid structure of traditional CRMs. Traditional CRMs are bloated and slow, forcing teams to adapt to their software rather than the other way around. Attio lets you shape your CRM around your workflow, auto-updates records with real-time email and calendar data, and makes relationship tracking seamless. Attio’s pipeline insights feature flags stalled deals, overdue follow-ups, and silent stakeholders—giving teams a real-time risk radar for customer and partner relationships.

• Mem0 – AI’s missing piece: a memory layer that helps models remember past interactions. Teams can capture notes, tasks, references, and ideas in a self-organizing digital workspace. Juggling meeting notes, Slack convos, and scattered documents wastes valuable time. Mem0 syncs everything you jot down—automatically categorizing it by context so you can find and act on insights instantly. Mem0’s AI-driven auto-sorting groups notes based on topics, projects, and intent—so when you mention “customer feedback,” it knows where to store it.

• Keywords AI – AI observability and monitoring for teams deploying large language models. It logs AI-generated outputs, monitors errors, and helps teams debug and refine their AI-driven products. AI isn’t set-and-forget—teams need visibility into what their models are doing, where they struggle, and how they impact users. Keywords AI offers real-time insights so teams can fine-tune AI-driven experiences before they fail in production. Auto-generate structured labels for features, tasks, and user interactions and help teams organize their backlog and optimize their AI-powered workflows with minimal manual effort.

Wildcard Wonders Bracket

• Sketch – The OG of modern UI design, Sketch still reigns as a vector-based design tool for Mac lovers. Crisp layouts, fluid prototyping, and a colossal plugin ecosystem—Sketch evolves with your product’s design maturity. Their web-based handoff now ensures dev teams see up-to-date specs in real time—fewer misalignments, fewer frantic Slack messages at midnight.

• Rulebase – AI-driven fraud detection that trains employees to avoid voice phishing scams. It simulates phishing attacks and monitors calls for fraud risk, using AI-driven voice biometrics and behavioral analysis. AI-generated voice scams and deepfake impersonations are on the rise. Rulebase protects organizations by proactively training employees to spot fraud while automatically detecting and preventing real social engineering threats in live calls. Rulebase acts as an AI security layer for phone systems, stopping CEO fraud, customer impersonations, and high-stakes vishing scams before they cause damage.

• Dropback – The front-office tool bringing pro-level data management to college sports teams. It brings roster, scholarship, and NIL (Name, Image, Likeness) financial planning into one smart, data-driven workspace. College sports recruiting and roster planning have become more complex than ever with NIL deals and transfer rules constantly shifting. Dropback lets coaches simulate “what-if” roster changes, manage scholarship allocations, and optimize recruiting strategy—all in real time. Dropback’s interactive scenario modeling is a game-changer—coaches can instantly see how losing key players, signing new recruits, or adjusting NIL budgets affects their roster and financial standing.

• Reform – An automation powerhouse for logistics, eliminating freight industry paperwork nightmares. It streamlines document processing, workflow automation, and system integration—handling data-heavy tasks so freight companies can focus on operations, not paperwork. The freight industry runs on a mountain of forms, invoices, customs filings, and shipping documents—and manual data entry slows everything down. Reform automates these processes, reducing errors, improving efficiency, and integrating seamlessly with transport management systems (TMS). Reform’s AI works right out of the box—no extensive setup required. It extracts, normalizes, and processes any document format with 98% accuracy, ensuring data flows instantly into existing workflows.

Follow us on LinkedIn, and Jump in and start voting March 25! May the best product tool win.