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As a product professional, staying organized and efficient is crucial. Over time, I’ve experimented with three tools that have significantly boosted my productivity, and I was so impressed that I ended up sharing them with the team at Pixelmatters. These tools helped me streamline my workflow, especially when juggling multiple tasks and projects.
Raycast ⚡️
Raycast is like Mac Spotlight on steroids. From small improvements, to features like Quicklinks and Alias, the amount of clicks this saves me every day is crazy! This is a must-have for me.
Let me tell you what I love most about Raycast.
Features that take the gold
On the Extensions tab, you can install new extensions via the store. Raycast has an incredibly rich library of extensions to choose from, including Linear, Todoist, Jira, Figma, and so many others.
For each of these extensions, you can configure the actions or tasks you want to activate, from a huge list of them. Let’s take Todoist: you can choose to activate “create task”, “create project”, “home”, “search”, and so forth. I also use the Figma extension and one of the things I find useful is searching for files by typing their name directly via Raycast.
For each of these actions you configure, you can customize them even further: you can define an Alias — a keyword that will prompt the action. This saves a huge amount of time. Using Todoist as an example: if I configure “todo” as the Alias for the action “create task”, in the future I will just need to type “todo” via Raycast whenever I want to create a new task on Todoist.
For me, there’s something that makes an even bigger impact: Quicklinks. I use Quicklinks all the time to quickly open my most used web pages (many workspaces on Notion, Basecamp projects, etc.) in seconds with no clicks.
These are going to work similarly to the Alias for each extension’s tasks, but for any custom links you want to use. Think of the links you use most on your day-to-day. Those are the ones worth configuring on Quicklinks, with an Alias prompt as well. You’ll just need to start typing those Alias via Raycast, hit enter on the top result, and boom.
Raycast has this great tutorial on Youtube — Master Quicklinks in Raycast — that I highly recommend watching if you want to learn quicker.
Raycast for Product teams
The integration with project management tools can be a game-changer for Product teams. With Linear and Jira, for instance, you can manage tasks, track project status, and stay updated on project progress much faster.
Perplexity AI 🧠
Perplexity AI is on a whole new level compared to ChatGPT for research. Less useful for brainstorming, but still relevant. Look at it as a Google replacer!
It has access to many models, not just the OpenAI ones, like Gemini, Claude, and so on. Let’s get deeper into the most potent Perplexity features.
Features that take the gold
Perplexity always shows you the top sources it uses to generate answers. I find this especially useful in our Product team’s context, since it’s relevant information we can use in client communications or brainstorms. Using AI-powered chats is fine, but knowing what web pages those AI models get their info from is even better. 🔥
The Copilot feature is also very interesting. It explains what’s going on “behind the scenes” of Perplexity while it's preparing the answer to your prompt, explaining its thought process and investigation. It will even ask you follow-up questions during that process to narrow down the best output.
Collections are also super useful. You can basically create new Perplexity threads within specific collections so that they’re organized and grouped together.
There's also an option to upload images for free (3x day)!
Perplexity AI for Product teams
Perplexity can be an extremely powerful tool for Product teams. You can use it to conduct in-depth market research and analyze competitor products, identify emerging trends, understand client needs, and more. I truly recommend using it to uncover valuable insights that inform your product development decisions.
Arc Browser 🏄♂️
The Arc Browser is a Chromium browser with a much better experience than others out there and very rich in shortcuts. It’s also a great combo with Raycast. If you use Chrome, it should be a quick replacement.
Arc has many shortcuts that I won't explore in this blog post, but I highly recommend you search for them in their Resource Center because it's another quick way of increasing your productivity.
PS: Designers will love its full-screen display by default. 🔥
Features that take the gold
One of the standout features of Arc is its full-screen view, which eliminates distractions like URLs, tabs, and other UI elements, giving you a more immersive and focused browsing experience.
A retractable or fixed side panel is where your "control panel" will live, and where you’ll be able to organize all your web pages. You can save up to 6 links on your “favorites” section. This makes it quick and convenient to find your frequently visited websites. With a simple hover, you’ll even be able to see a preview of the web pages. 🤩
Additionally, Arc Browser enables you to set up different profiles, such as personal and professional, allowing you to organize your browsing history and preferences.
For those who like to keep their favorite links organized, the named folder feature is a lifesaver. For Product Owners, I find it particularly helpful to have a separate folder for each client, ensuring easy access to relevant resources.
Arc also offers a variety of customization options, including themes, colors, and more. I highly suggest watching some tutorials like this one — Arc Browser | Setting up Spaces & Profiles — to get your Arc Browser customized to perfection. ✨
The Arc 🤝 Raycast combo
Using Quicklinks on Raycast, which open in new windows, and the shortcut Cmd+A to automatically move that window into my main Arc browser window, I seamlessly combine both tools to superpower my work flow. The main benefit for me is working with a lot less clicks than I used to.
A productivity trio worth setting up
It took me around 2 to 3 hours to set up these tools.
Raycast takes a bit more time than Perplexity and Arc (you can use both almost instantaneously with minimal setup) to make it worth using, but I hope this blog post’s tips help you set these up quicker.
Once this productivity trio is under your skin (it may take a couple of days), you won’t look back. The combination of these tools with everything else we already use at Pixelmatters is a 10% productivity boost, easily.
Have a great time setting up! And hope you’re ready to start having more time on your hands. 😎
