Aha! Roadmaps is used to set strategy, prioritize features, and share visual plans. It includes Aha! Ideas Essentials for crowdsourcing feedback. For an integrated product development approach, Aha! Roadmaps and Aha! Develop can be used together. The software is available with a 30-day trial.
$59
per month per user
Jama Connect
Score 8.5 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Jama Connect® is a Requirements Management software and Requirements Traceability solution. Jama Software enables teams to manage product requirements and enable Live Traceability™ across the development process, in order to reduce cycle times and improve product quality.
Jama provides cleaner workflows for entering requirements and a really efficient and robust workflow for approvals which other products didn’t have or were still maturing.
It is great for organizations that want to ensure that the work they focus on is the work that will have the most impact on value and drive them toward their strategic objectives. I consider it to be a real Product Management tool. If all you are looking for is a tool to hold your product backlog or collect customer feedback, then Aha! is probably going to be overkill for your needs
Jama is an excellent tool for requirements management, development, and traceability throughout the development lifecycle. Jama aids in peer reviews of generated artifacts with time-boxed review cycles. Jama provides a robust ecosystem which is highly tailorable to the demands of the particular organization in which it is used
Aha! is an all around product management suite. It is great for breaking product plans into initiatives, features, and user stories. This helps the organization understand the product plan and what is driving individual work items. Unlike Jira and project management tools, it helps you prioritize by major themes, features, and releases. Once you start to use it, you can't go back to a project management tool because the views for organizing and prioritizing features just isn't there.
Aha! also excels at idea management. You can create a portal for users to submit ideas and manage them through a workflow. Users can submit ideas through a variety of channels, including email, ZenDesk, and SalesForce. You can even attach account values to an idea submitted through SalesForce, though the UI in SalesForce is a little kludgy. This is a great feature for those that have the capacity to manage feedback this way, but be aware that it takes time to manage.
Aha! works pretty well with Jira so that project managers can have their backlog that is understandable to the business and engineering can break down those work items however they want.
Aha! also has a lot of useful integrations: Slack, ZenDesk, Zapier, etc. It also integrates with every major software project management tool on the market: Jira, Pivotal, Rally, Redmine, and TFS.
Focus in the content without loosing the track of the evolution of the items by maintaining the exchange of information between the users inside the Tool.
The possibilities to integrate this tool within our IT-landcape and with our other engineering tools is for us a leverage to success.
The 'filtering' capabilities in Jama are not as good as they could be. In particular, the ability to "nest" filters is quite limited. I have certain seen much better capabilities in other tools. ('Cradle' is an example of a tool with excellent "nested filters" capabilities.)
From an administrative point of view, the 'License' admin view is pretty disappointing. The particular thing that I'd like to be able to find out from it is the peak number of 'Float Creator' licenses in concurrent use on each day. If there's a way to get to that information, I haven't found it yet.
Jama is really easy to use and operate compared to other tools. This allows a process owner to get easier buy-in from the organization to see value early. My experience with this tool was very positive and we were able to see value early in its introduction
If you have the time and resources there really isn't anything you can't get Aha! to do for you in regards to managing workflow and releases. The Prioritization features are top of its class, the dashboards are getting better and better every day and the team all seem to really enjoy using it to manage their workloads.
Jama is mostly designed for requirement gathering, but that can be possible using JIRA if we add only approval type of plugin for special requirement types. Jama's performance and features do not improve on a periodic basis i.e. with each release. Even bug fixes take a lot of time and they don't care about customer impact.
Jama is available most of the time if it is used within the application's boundary. Jama has very good availability if we use very high hardware servers. Sometimes we face issues if there are batch operations running.
With performance compared to JIRA, I do recommend Jama in this case. Jama provides very good performance, it loads immediately for any of the items and searches any item immediately. Performance is really good in all of the operations including creating stories, epics, item types or other support operations or report generation.
When we signed up for Aha!, we were assigned an Aha! team members to help us with training/questions. The meeting was set weekly, and it exponentially helped with our familiarity with Aha! Support is beneficial and has a lot of experience working with product teams.
They typically answer within minutes of posting a ticket, and then you have a clear expectation of what the issue is, how to diagnose it, how long will it take to get resolved, and in which version a given problem is resolved, or if there is a patch for hosted services. They have a number of support people, and all of them are top-notch.
Jama 2015.5 implementation is very smooth and no need for much manual work. Jama 8 has many challenges and we can not install it as smoothly as Jama 2015.5. Initially, Jama didn't provide the Jama 8's installer files or zip files and they were just providing docker files to everyone (which was really strange). It is the worst that they don't provide all the files at a time. Why should they tell us where we should deploy, and why only a dockerfile? I am not very satisfied with Jama implementation.
In terms of outright features, a lot of roadmapping tools have the same feature set. We chose Aha! based on look-and-feel, the easy learning curve, and the reviews it has. Between collaboration, milestone tracking, comment threads, and content importing and exporting, we had every feature in Aha! that we were looking for.
The major sellingpoints of Jama were the review-system for internal and external reviewers and the inclusion of (Use Case) modelling tools, while keeping the core requirements-centric. Ability to synchronise with currently in use test-tooling and the low learning curve were additional selling points. Availablity of support in our local language was much appreciated as well.
There is no horizontal scalability available in Jama, we have only one choice to scale it vertically. But vertical scalable applications always have limitations to grow. In this case, Jama doesn't support horizontal scalability functions like multi-node architectures with a shared drive for the home directory.
It has helped us improve our product lifecycle communication. We have less wasted time spent figuring out where the project is and what it's waiting on. This has helped departments further down the project better use their time so they're already aligned with what's happening rather than waiting for a handoff.
Aha! has helped include our customers more in our product planning and especially in our bug fixes and new feature roadmaps.
Aha! has improved our strategy meetings or roundup discussions by storing everything in one place. They're shorter and more focused.
