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
Powernoodle
Score 7.5 out of 10
N/A
Powernoodle is designed to help leaders make better quality decisions by quickly and effectively engaging the collective wisdom of stakeholders. The vendor aims to provide the most powerful, yet easy to use, Decision Engagement Platform. Cloud technology is fused with 50 years of cognitive, behavioral, and decision science to focus stakeholders, and minimize the biases, barriers and dysfunctions typical to most organizations that get in the way of making quality…
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
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.
Powernoodle has ignited deeper, more candid conversations among our team leaders. We've been able to see through these discussions that we haven't always told our story in the most compelling manner, and that we need to be clearer, more concise and less wordy. Since Powernoodle limits your contributions to a certain number of characters, it forces you to think hard about what you really want to say. This feature was particularly powerful for our organization, which has tended to verbosity.
Powernoodle allowed us to vet old and new ideas in a safe space, minimizing biases and groupthink. In many organizations there are some who speak more than others, and often their ideas get more attention. What Powernoodle does brilliantly is it allows, actually requires, each participant to write what they wish anonymously and without interruption. Each participant is equal in the sense that all input into Powernoodle is brief (limited number of characters) and the anonymity definitely prevents the usual bias toward those who speak the most.
Powernoodle increased critical thinking about our organization and forced us to re-examine why and how we do what we do. With Powernoodle, we were able to look at everyone's ideas, comment on them, decide if some should be merged, and ultimately vote on them. The Powernoodle process forced us to be clear, which meant we each needed to think critically about what has worked and what hasn't worked for us, and how we move forward with what has worked and with new ideas.
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.
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.
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.
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.
While we are still in the beginning stages of taking action on the decisions we made using the Powernoodle process, I have no doubt that there will be a very positive ROI on our overall objectives.
