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
Smartsheet
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
Smartsheet is an online project management and collaboration tool. It includes automated alerts, instantaneous updating and sharing across team members, resource management, nested tasks organized in a hierarchy, a Gantt chart view, exportable and automated reports, and integration with email.
Aha! is a better fit for the specific type of strategic planning that I do. The other tools are more intended for other grains of planning and/or execution.
Wizeline is an up-and-comer in this space. At the time we considered them, the solution was not robust enough to manage a large backlog or multiple products with a JIRA integration. They are adding features rapidly, though, and every release is very robust.
Smartsheet
Verified User
Account Manager
Chose Smartsheet
Smartsheet has more features than Google Sheets but is more cumbersome to use. Aha! allows users to more visually apply tasks and tickets to corresponding topics and timelines.
Smartsheet is a happy medium of easy to use for fundamental timeline management with added …
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
For teams and users who are very familiar with Excel and its mode of operation, Smartsheet will feel like a walkover. If you have a number of users who use Excel or Google Sheets for their personal project management then you will find this tool to be very useful and somewhat familiar.
Teams that may be used to other project management suites or styles would find Smartsheet a bit challenging to adapt to, as formulas and formatting can be challenging to adapt to.
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.
Smartsheet set up is similar to Excel, yet when you upload an Excel file, things like conditional formatting are lost. Smartsheet has its own conditional formatting, and you have to reinstate the rules. It would be great if those would apply automatically once a file is uploaded
Some Smartsheet management and access rules can take some tweaking to work properly. This may be a case of offering more info to admins so they can apply these better and with more efficiency
It definitely meets our needs as far as organizing and archiving our tasks and files. As we train more staff to view it, I see opportunities for more improvement, which I am sure this program can handle. I look forward to seeing continued improvement from Smartsheet on their capabilities and functionality.
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.
Smartsheet is very easy to learn. However, while I have been able to pick it easily, Microsoft Excel and Project super users that I have trained on Smartsheet get bogged down in the differences and can find it frustrating. Explaining the differences ahead of time and why Smartsheet is being chosen instead of a different software seems to counteract those reactions
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.
I give this rating because it fills a niche in the market. MS Project scares many away from proper task management but there are limited tools our there, especially cloud-based that are mobile-friendly. Smartsheet fills this market gap, especially for small to medium-sized businesses. IT is not fair to compare it to MS Project, but fairer to see what gaps it fills.
It's absolutely paramount to take a few minutes to actually play with the software. It's nearly impossible to do anything wrong or make a mistake which cannot be fixed easily. Under the help menu is Live Training option. After you familiarize yourself with the commands, watch the live training for some in depth understanding of how to make the software fit your needs perfectly.
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.
Jira and Redmine are much more robust and technologically advanced project management solutions. I enjoy using either when managing a very large project. However, I prefer to use Smartsheet for my smaller to medium sized projects. As for Google Drive - I would say that Google sheets and Smartsheet are almost identical in my opinion when it comes to functionality. Personally I prefer to manage smaller projects via Google Drive, but it is a personal preference!
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.
