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
Planisware
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
Planisware is project portfolio management software for product development and R&D. The company was founded in 1996 and is headquartered in San Francisco, with locations in Germany, France and Japan.
ProdPad is directly built for product management in a way that fit with our existing process. Trello and Basecamp require more work to organize things how you like, Aha!'s take on roadmaps is fundamentally wrong for our team.
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
While not expensive, it is better suited to larger organizations since the requirement for an administrator is not easily maintained at lower user counts. Although the more a site uses it "out of the box" without configuration, the less the requirement for a system administrator.
It's definitely an improvement over our old Enhancements list that anyone could add to and just collected dust on a Share drive. ProdPad allows ideas to be sorted and archived, plus let's people comment on ideas - so it's pretty obvious is something is a good idea with lots of support or just some crackpot theory.
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.
I'd like to see a better way to handle archived/won't do/already released feedback or ideas so that you have a bit of a history of requests and what has happened to them.
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.
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.
Excellent quick response from team members, great opportunities to engage in design discussions for upcoming features, never had a bug last long or go unresolved. Overall, support is one of the best parts of working with ProdPad.
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.
We were just capturing ideas in an Excel workbook, but that forced ownership to a single user for changes and updates and there wasn't any direct integration with project backlog. We actually didn't select ProdPad, a new VP came and brought it with him because it worked so well at his last place. Everybody here jumped on board, though.
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.
This is always hard to gauge since we don't have metrics for "did nothing" to compare against. An old Business Roundtable white paper indicated that a 10% reduction in expense could be attained, but I don't think a general statement like that applies to any specific organization unless they can say their Project Management Maturity level is low.
