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
Receptive.io (discontinued)
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Pendo Feedback (or Receptive / Receptive.io, acquired by Pendo in 2019) was a SaaS product demand intelligence platform used to collect product feedback and feature requests from customers as well as internal teams. Some years after the acquisition, the product was discontinued.
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
Receptive is very effective for multiple internal teams/department of a single product who need to scale their product feedback management effectively. We've been leveraging it for one of our products and it was so successful, that we implemented it with a second product. The main issue we ran into situationally with that was managing 2+ modules (products) in Receptive; it was a bit more difficult to present Receptive to two different customer bases/users (we couldn't change the appearance) and slightly confusing to do within the app (lots of filtering needed). I have heard that support of multiple modules is something that Receptive will likely be working on in the near future, so that's good news.
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 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.
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 had UserVoice prior to Receptive but it was just too clunky and extensive for our needs. It was less about automation and still very manual work to process feedback. It also didn't provide collaboration levels that we needed for our internal teams to work together. ProdPad was a very clean tool but also didn't enable us to automate the process like Receptive does.
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.
We were managing these enhancements in our support ticketing system, using spreadsheets, and it was TERRIBLE. Being able to tell a user "Great idea! Submit it to Feedback!" has saved my support team hundreds of hours.
We have reduced incoming support requests when the request is really an enhancement - the ability to have a "Suggest Features" widget in our software sends users straight to Feedback.
Because we can make some fields required, we can cut down on the need to reach back out to our users for clarification.
