Aha! Roadmaps

Mapping feature work to strategy/value.

Flexibility in adapting to how we work. (customization capabilities)

Integration into third-party tools.

Capturing ideas directly into the product.

No mobile app is available.

The hierarchy of theme/epic/feature/story doesn't line up easily with Jira.

The UI of the product is a little dated and could use some TLC.

The customization capabilities can sometimes make the product complex.

It can be laggy on occasion.

Track all software related work in one place

Great way to prioritize work based on requirements and urgency

Extremely scale-able

Requires some dedicated work to get up and running

Not as "pretty" as some tracking systems

Can be overwhelming if you don't use it frequently

Ideas portal for internal as well as external

An easy way to present your roadmap without having to build a new PowerPoint deck should something change.

Integration with third-party products is simple.

Their support staff is excellent, always available, and all former product managers, so their domain knowledge is unmatched.

The roadmap feature presentation web page could use some better visuals. It's a little bland and grey.

The mobile app only shows you what you are assigned. I am not able to manage through the mobile app--I need to use the web page.

Work breakdown - it allows teams to do initiatives, capabilities features and stories all in the same product release.

Roadmapping - allows for simple combined visual plan of work breakdown across multiple initiatives.

Customization - allows different levels of work breakdowns to be available on different projects.

Integration with Rally and other tools.

Complexity of integration - each implementation of an integration with Rally has to be manually created.

Complexity of configuration - each project that has a customization has to be done independently.

Cost per license is too high for contributors.

Features collection.

Ideas scratch pad.

Detailed overview of collected ideas and features.

Advanced configuration and usage - not an easy UI/UX.

Out-of-the-box overview (e.g. show me all features from Group X).

Collaboration encouragement - comment threads make it super easy to keep track of the team's input.

Milestones - Have these built into the tool help the team track progress on key goals and keep everyone motivated and up to date.

Great UI - everything is simply and clearly laid out for the best possible experience. Lots of customization too.

Notes - There's not a great place to leave lots of notes or instructions, almost like a Confluence page. Although not required, it would be nice to have this built in.

Learning curve - As with most new tools, there's a bit of a learning curve to become proficient.

Building a roadmap

Feature request board

Collecting competitive intel

Aha! is a little expensive

Roadmapping

Feature creation and management

Integration with other development platforms

Visualizations of project timelines

The system administrator interface is somewhat clunky.

Difficult to manage initiatives visualization for larger organizations that create many of them.

Difficult to track released products by feature content.

Excellent organization, because it allows us to filter by status and category

Easy enough to keep track of my own submitted ideas and items I've voted on

Beautiful comment threads to see everyone's thoughts

Great notification system to see what's changed and how, so I don't have to live and breathe Aha!

I wish the notifications could be streamlined, so that the text of the email was just simpler and easier on the eyes, and that I could respond to comments by replying to the email instead of opening up Aha! again.

A little more color wouldn't hurt. The UX is smooth, but the design is rather bland. It still gets the job done though.

Product road-mapping is best in Aha!

The types of boards it has gives flexibility to every kind of product managers.

It has various matrices to make the foundation for a good PRD.

Bug tracking needs to be improvised, JIRA has upper hand in this.

Notes section can be improved as we found less flexibility in Notes.

The integration of Tech team to use Aha! needs to be strengthened. As of now, Tech is reliable on project tracking software rather than Aha!

Aha! can track roadmaps, timelines and projects alongside parent and child tasks or campaigns

Aha! creates an easy way to vote up projects or bugs that should be worked

Simple way to allow customers to provide feedback and input on features and bugs

Look and feel seems to be similar, no matter what options are chosen

Putting everything in a single view can be difficult, depending on how much you're tracking

Would be nice to have a little more integrated way of getting through roadmaps and projects so you aren't switching back and forth

Roadmap and strategic planning. It is an essential tool for product management.

It has near limitless customization capability.

The ability to create custom reports and dashboards make it a major strength in a broader adoption in our own organization

I think Aha tries to do too much at times. It tries a bit too hard to handle project management as well as product management and as a result can often fall short.

Since everything is customized, it is hard to really get the initial implementation correct, even with Enterprise onboarding support.

There needs to be some serious work and training around how the integrations with Trello, JIRA, and other essential tools work as it is hard to understand them in a way to explain to our own IT teams and it has caused confusion.

Provides an easy to understand visual for upcoming releases and what is included.

Makes it easy for Product Managers to interact directly with users via the Idea Bank portal.

Provides a way to link dependencies and related features to help understand expected feature releases.

Policing the idea bank to make sure ideas are specific and representative of a single idea is a manual task.

There are a lot of times when I save and close an item and it just disappears from my current view. This is usually due to user error, it just seems too easy to make those errors all too often. I wish I was warned if I'm about to save (or close) a record that is going to disappear from my current view.

I wish there was easy to find, approachable training material to teach me how to use parts of the system that I don't even look at today (such as Personnas)

Very flexible workflows, custom fields, terminology, and interface design

Easy to get started with whatever elements you want to use without requiring an all in approach. For example, we started with features and releases. After we were comfortable with the product we started managing our goals and initiatives. Even later we opened an idea portal to work with the rest of our business

Nice clean look. Good documentation. Responsive support.

Cannot sync time estimation data between aha and JIRA. Cannot sync feature dependencies between aha and JIRA. Both of these limitations exist despite both systems supporting this data and their implementations being nearly identical.

Keeps adding new features (with sketch, invision, etc, etc out there who the hell wanted to create mockups using aha?!?) without finishing baking those they have. Take alook at the great input on their idea portal and you'll see ideas from years ago that (a) are quite popular and (b) unfinished

Expensive

One central location to collaborate among team members

So confusing to learn. Way too many options and easy to forget how to access what you are looking for.

Being able to organize projects into workstreams/releases helps to show progress and priority.

Custom workflows are great for making Aha! work within our established processes while allowing room for growth and change.

The cards are really smart with being able to customize contents and color so that I can glance over the board and see what needs attention.

Some of the workflows will auto update in non-sensical ways… For instance, it will update a project that is marked as "In Progress" in JIRA to "Done" in Aha!

The integration with JIRA doesn't allow auto-updating so that when one of the people I manage adds a project in JIRA it doesn't show up in Aha! until I manually create it in Aha!

It's costly to add additional seats to the license so I only have the essential people with permissions to edit or create.

I love the ideas list. If we have repeating ideas it's easy to prioritize them to our road map.

I created and used the competitors list to really break down how we compare against other companies.

Releases shows a clean overview of our product road map.

When I first started using Aha! I was quite overwhelmed with all of the features. This may be due to user error, but I would have liked more guidance through each step.

The UI is incredibly simple and intuitive - I picked it up with no particular training.

I like how you can sort or filter your boards and tasks into different styles of display until you find the one that works best for you.

The internal naming system is really natural, even for people who haven't used a kanban board, sprints, or agile before.

The little side features, like linking to external documentation or tying cards together into groups, are all really well handled and easy to use.

Some people fuss about it being overly simplistic, but I find that I prefer it.

We never took much advantage of the integrations - it'd be nice to push a task from Slack to my board.

The board-to-board functionality between peer boards (ie: not two of my own, but my boss's board to mine) was a little rickety.

I'd like to see a cleaner archive function.

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.

There are a few catches once you get down to using it. For example, Aha! maps products to projects as a one-to-one in JIRA. Why should anyone care? If your Engineering team is organized into functional groups that work on more than one product, this can be a mess. You can't send features to two different teams for one product. Other products like Wizeline support this.

Idea management can be overvalued. Be sure you need it before you make it a must-have feature. Idea management is great for enterprise B2B companies with a small base of users to support and the development capacity to be responsive to ad hoc feedback. Think a closed beta participant group, a CAB or small disciplined internal user group like Customer Success. However, it takes a large PM team and excess capacity in Development to manage this sort of feedback. Otherwise, you set yourself up for failure. Look at Aha!'s own idea portal, and you can see it takes a large PM team to track everything, and even then, the user community has to accept that there isn't going to be an immediate response the way a service desk would respond to a problem ticket. If this functionality is not key, there are other tools like User Voice that can be purchased separately later to provide best of breed feedback management.

Capacity Planning is a major missing feature. Aha! has half functional capacity planning. It requires manual entry and does not support easy bottom up feedback and progress tracking from the dev team working in JIRA. My team found that it was not usable enough to show what was above or below the line on the fly. This is very disempowering for Product Managers who 'want their mojo back' as Aha!'s marketing says. There is a huge discussion in the Aha! user community about this. Even Brian and Chris have responded, so they are looking at it. It's hard to lead management discussions about what to do when resource tradeoffs on what is above or below the line are not clear. This has been one of the most requested features that is still not there after a year of users clamoring for it...

The Salesforce integration is not as useful as we thought. My Sales Team found it unusable because of kludgy UI issues. Also, it was hard for users to pile on with other accounts needing the feature, so it only represented one ask from one account, not the market. Plus, it can be totally random which sales person speaks up, leading to a squeaky wheel effect. We found it easier to run this kind of analysis through our web analytics tool, Woopra. Any major account requests were just handled the old fashioned way.

We did not use the strategy or roadmap screens as much. We really just needed a wiki to store this info. Old fashioned PowerPoint and tools like Product Plan can cover this as an alternative. Our core usage centered around the initiatives, the product backlog screen, and the reporting (for the roadmap as opposed to the actual roadmap page).