Aha! Roadmaps vs. Ideanote

• 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.

Best suited: In focused, facilitator driven idea noting or discussion session. Less suited: There is no force factor to get users to come back to the mission or page once the session is over. There is no what happens next driver for Missions.

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

• Excellent UI - clean and uncluttered. It paves your way rather than gets in your way.
• Solid UX - each feature seem to guide but not push towards the desired outcome.
• Versatility - the tool can be used for an endless variety of purposes.
• Analytics - Ideanote not only helps you gather and rate ideas but it provides insight about who contribute the most in your company's creative process.
• Ready made templates for common use cases help structure & direct the goals of your workspace quickly.

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

• Just dumping a user onto a page can be a bit jarring for some people. So more visual cues around what to do next would be great.
• Having missions open and accessible to the public would be great - rather than being constrained by the number of "seats" an account has.
• Individual comapny/department reporting/insights would be helpful, rather just a report on the Mission page.

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

It is a reliable service and the support Team is very focused on our satisfaction, when there is a question.

A roadmap we can have also as a script and install it somewhere - but the feeling the Interface is sending

gives clearness, that we so much need, also we are just at the start on the process. But it helped and

users and team members are easy to get into the game on the platform and not in fear,

[be]cause it is simpl[y] made. This is also a very great point I have lost some people to onboard with another

solution, but with Ideanote all members are delighted by the design.

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

• Ideas are well tracked and centralized in one place.
• We can prioritize ideas and take immediate actions on them.
• Our team members are recognized for contributing improvement ideas and hence our team is encouraged to think outside the box about business challenges.