Aha! Roadmaps vs. FogBugz

• Aha! is the all around product management tool. You need something once you build out a product management role and grow beyond a small scrum team with one or two products. JIRA, Pivotal, and project management tools don't cut it for aligning [engineering] with product initiatives once the backlog starts to scale.
• On the other hand, there are several unfinished features that my peers all admit to having to work around: Capacity Planning, Salesforce Integration, Roadmap Display Flexibility, User Feedback, etc. This year has been all about reporting in terms of feature releases. As Aha! grows, they will fill in these other areas, so stay tuned.

Fogbugz is great for case-and-task based businesses. If your business has hundreds of weekly anticipated tasks that exist, such as processes to get files converted, Fogbugz can manage these processes very well. For our team, we knew each week that we would have about 500 tasks or orders to get processed. Fogbugz helped us break down these projects, get them assigned evenly throughout the team, and easily see who is working on what task. FogBugz is also good for tracking unanticipated tasks like bugs, making notes, flowcharts, and categorizing if the problem is a bug, feature request, etc. For us, it was just the best at nailing down those anticipated tasks.

Incentivized

• Work breakdown - it allows teams to do initiatives, capabilities features and stories all in the same product release.
• Roadmapping - allows for simple combined visual plan of work breakdown across multiple initiatives.
• Customization - allows different levels of work breakdowns to be available on different projects.
• Integration with Rally and other tools.

Incentivized

• Good for documenting
• Good for attaching things

Incentivized

• Notes - There's not a great place to leave lots of notes or instructions, almost like a Confluence page. Although not required, it would be nice to have this built in.
• Learning curve - As with most new tools, there's a bit of a learning curve to become proficient.

Incentivized

• Workflow capability is very limited to the original implementation, could use a refresh and extension of the capabilities
• UI/UX needs improvement. This was in the works prior to purchase by DevFactory, and has taken a back seat to backend improvements that rightfully needed to be fixed first.
• Pricing model doesn't fit our usage very well, so we're paying for full-featured users for everyone even though the majority of Users only need to submit Cases and modify the Wikis, and our small percentage of Users are in Dev and need all features.

Incentivized

I think Aha! works really in general, it offers a very comprehensive and well-structured platform that supports strategic product management at scale. Although there is a learning curve for new users and a few areas to be improved. Overall, it is highly usable for experienced product teams who need a robust roadmap tool.

Incentivized

We've always had excellent support whenever we need help from the company or need questions answered regarding the setup and installation of the product. Tickets are answered in a timely fashion and there's minimal back and forth to get issues resolved, which are rare.

Incentivized

productboard was used in the organization when I arrived, but after assessing productboard, I felt it was too lightweight for our ambitious product goals. It's also critical, especially in a startup, that we focus our limited capacity on the work that matters most. Aha! far and away had superior capabilities in defining strategy directly in the product and associating all of our work to the strategy. Aha! is a serious product management tool and I found productboard to be more of a simple backlog management tool.

Incentivized

FogBugz is made for the Developers who actually use it every day, while JIRA is made for the C-Suite who oversees them but has little idea of the finer points of daily dev tasks. In reality, most don't fit into the mold of JIRA tickets, and the summarized information that C-Suite is reviewing is incomplete or skewed. There is also an outstanding issue since 2004 that JIRA refuses to implement despite wide user support, the merging of tickets. You can see the open ticket with the JIRA team here: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-3592

Incentivized

• It has been able to deliver a good overall view of all the items we have going on in ADO.
• We are in the process of transforming from waterfall to agile development and to be able to see an overall picture of the work items is invaluable.

Incentivized

• Less downtime of jobs. It is each person's responsibility to check their list to see if they have any pending work.
• When people are out sick or busy, a supervisor can easily shift work from one person to another who many have time to cover work.
• Management has a quick view into seeing what is happening with a job and can use it as a tool to request addiional resources as needed.