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Aha! Roadmaps

Aha! Roadmaps

Overview

What is Aha! Roadmaps?

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…

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Aha! Roadmaps is widely used by product management, engineering, and management teams for managing the product backlog and roadmap. The …
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Worth the learning curve

6 out of 10
January 26, 2018
Incentivized
Our organization is using Aha! to help provide transparency across departments. We also use Aha! to collect information about competitors …
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Pricing

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Premium

$59

Cloud
per month per user

Enterprise

$99

Cloud
per month workspace owner or contributor

Enterprise+

$149

Cloud
per month workspace owner or contributor

Entry-level set up fee?

  • Setup fee optional
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.aha.io/product/pricing

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Product Details

What is Aha! Roadmaps?

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.

Aha! Roadmaps Features

  • Supported: Goals can be set and linked through to key features, and the product roadmap.
  • Supported: Each product feature can be assigned a product value score based on goals to prioritize what will deliver the most impact.
  • Supported: Can be used to monitor progress status and communicate updates.
  • Supported: Provides interactive roadmap presentations.
  • Supported: Generates visualizations from entering data once.
  • Supported: Captures feedback from customers, colleagues and partners via a custom-branded portal. Ideas and be ranked on value and effort, and promoted to the product roadmap.
  • Supported: Plan visualizations displays the timing and scope of critical initiatives, launches, and projects, ensuring the capacity, deliverables, and dependencies can be seen across teams.

Aha! Roadmaps Screenshots

Screenshot of Goal TrackingScreenshot of Ideas PortalScreenshot of Features BoardScreenshot of Visual RoadmapScreenshot of Progress ReportScreenshot of the collaborative whiteboardScreenshot of a central knowledge hub

Aha! Roadmaps Competitors

Aha! Roadmaps Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationApple iOS, Android

Frequently Asked Questions

ProductPlan, productboard, and Roadmunk are common alternatives for Aha! Roadmaps.

Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 9.1.

The most common users of Aha! Roadmaps are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(103)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Aha! Roadmaps is widely used by product management, engineering, and management teams for managing the product backlog and roadmap. The software's integration with other tools like Jira, Azure Dev Ops, Microsoft Teams, and Mavenlink project management enables seamless collaboration among different teams. Users appreciate the ideas portal feature in Aha! as it allows customers to enter and vote on ideas, guiding the development process to meet business needs effectively. With its ease of use in collecting and organizing features, Aha! simplifies the process for product managers, who find the learning curve for basic features quite straightforward.

The tool is particularly valued by product management teams for visualizing product roadmaps and managing dependencies efficiently. Its integration with Jira facilitates easy task tracking and updates, streamlining workflows for non-technical marketing teams. Aha! provides various helpful features such as visual orientation, internal linking capabilities, Gantt charts, and timeline mapping that aid in better planning and organization. By enabling users to track upcoming and current work across multiple teams within the entire organization, Aha! addresses the business problem of coordinating and managing efforts effectively. It allows product managers to associate each feature with its value to the organization and customers, setting it apart from other similar tools in the market. Additionally, Aha! serves as a platform for documenting product strategy, prioritizing initiatives, creating and tracking roadmaps, and communicating outcomes to engineering teams. IT and code-related functions also utilize Aha! to manage software releases, bug fixes, and ticket requests seamlessly.

Comprehensive Product Management Suite: Many users have found Aha! Roadmaps to be a comprehensive product management suite that excels in breaking down product plans into initiatives, features, and user stories. This feature helps the organization understand the product plan and the driving factors behind individual work items.

Effective Prioritization: Aha! stands out from project management tools like Jira by providing prioritization based on major themes, features, and releases. Users appreciate this feature as it allows them to organize and prioritize features effectively, making it difficult to go back to a traditional project management tool.

Idea Management Portal: Aha! is particularly useful for idea management. It offers a portal for users to submit ideas and manage them through a workflow. Some users appreciate that ideas can be submitted through various channels, including email, ZenDesk, and SalesForce. The ability to attach account values to ideas submitted through SalesForce is also appreciated.

Difficulty with Jira Mapping: Users have reported difficulties mapping products to projects in Jira, especially for engineering teams working on multiple products. This issue has been mentioned by several reviewers and affects the seamless integration between Aha! Roadmaps and Jira.

Overvalued Idea Management Feature: Some users feel that the idea management feature is overvalued and unnecessary for many companies, requiring a large product management team and excess development capacity. This sentiment has been expressed by multiple reviewers who believe that this feature adds complexity without providing significant value.

Missing Capacity Planning Feature: The lack of a robust capacity planning feature is considered a major drawback. Several reviewers have stated that the current capabilities are only half-functional, requiring manual entry and lacking easy feedback and progress tracking. This limitation hinders effective resource allocation and project planning within Aha! Roadmaps.

Based on user reviews, here are the three most common recommendations for the software:

  1. It is important to have a strong governance process before implementing the software. Take the time to understand its functions and customize it to fit your business.

  2. The software is a comprehensive tool for managing products throughout their lifecycle. Fully evaluate it before making a judgment on its usefulness. It can be particularly beneficial for commercial financing aids, sales communication progress, marketing project management, strategy adjustment, and goal setting.

  3. Take advantage of integrations with other tools like Jira, but be prepared for some customizations not mapping perfectly. Make use of the free trial and support offered by the software. Be ready for a steep learning curve initially, as the software has many useful features like roadmaps and data analysis.

Overall, users recommend using this software to centralize product planning and roadmapping work, make informed decisions, keep stakeholders informed, and efficiently manage projects in an enterprise-level environment.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-19 of 19)
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Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The Product team uses Aha! to manage our product backlog and perform release planning. Unlike other product management tools in the marketplace, Aha! allows us to quickly associate each feature to the value it will bring to the organization and to customers. We've integrated the product into several other SDLC tools so that we have an automated, and complete view into our processes. Additionally, we've leveraged the Aha! Ideas! portal which allows customers and internal team members to submit product ideas, and have those ideas immediately available within Aha! for review and possible assignment to our roadmap.

Mapping our work to value/strategy is a key differentiator between Aha! and other tools that we've evaluated or used in the past.
  • 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.
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.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We currently use Aha! across all IT and Code related functions at my organization to manage all software releases and fixes for current and future work in the company. It helps us create, prioritize, track, and monitor all work related to bug fixes, ticket requests, and future code release work for our systems.
  • 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
For large organizations looking to manage and categorize a significant amount of ongoing work and backlogs, Aha! is an excellent resource and tool to manage everything and everyone in one place. It's easy to use and is a great tool to visualize what needs to be done and keep the work on track. Not necessarily recommended for smaller project-based work.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
This is my second position where I have been able to use Aha! to assist in the overall product management of a company. My first was a larger one that was not ready to fully commit to integrating it into all of the support systems and was pretty much just a roadmap tracking tool. In my current position, I have just deployed Aha! for about 45 days, and we have already integrated it into Azure Dev Ops, and Microsoft Teams. We are also looking to integrate it with Mavenlink project management as well.

We have recently opened up the ideas portals and this has allowed us to present a simple way to interact with our customers, to allow them to enter, as well as vote on ideas for the product overall, to allow us to better guide the development organization towards building a product that meets business needs as opposed to simply keeping up with the Joneses on a feature by feature level.
  • 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.
Not only is Aha! pretty intuitive to use, the support is first class and their documentation is great!
Benjamin M Berry | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use it as the basis of our agile software development practice in conjunction with Rally and Github. It is used by the entire organization with various levels of complexity. It addresses the business problems of tracking upcoming and current work, as it is shared across multiple teams in the organization.
  • 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.
Aha! is well suited for large distributed teams with a substantial amount of requirements and different projects. It is also well suited for small teams that have a lot of divergent efforts. It is not well suited for creating a unified backlog from multiple large divergent products because it cannot well demonstrate the difference.
Gidon Leizer | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Aha! is a great tool for features collection. Quite nice for scribble pad, such as " do this, make this, collect this." Very easy to use basic features, very easy learning curve for the basic features collection.

If you need more advanced options it becomes a bit more tedious and complicated and you may require help, but Aha! has great support and sometimes contacted me without even asking for their help!
  • 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).
Well suited for:
  • Feature collection.
  • Ideas collection.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Aha! is being used within our company on a team-by-team basis. It's more or less up to the manager and product manager what roadmap software they want to use.

The business problem it addresses is finding the best way to track project goals and timelines. With the fast pace environment we work in here, it's very helpful to have a tool that can best visualize your team's and individual progress on a project.
  • 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.
Aha! is perfectly suited as a project management tool for a fast paced team. A situation where it may not be well suited is if you're trying to find something similar to Pivotal Tracker or Jira. It seems better suited for high level management.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Aha! is highly utilized by our product team related to features and our roadmap. It keeps us organized and prioritized, so we're communicating effectively.
  • Building a roadmap
  • Feature request board
  • Collecting competitive intel
  • Aha! is a little expensive
Aha! is very well suited for product teams of all sizes to build a detailed roadmap. Everything can be customized and changed as the company sees fit. It gives different levels of access that allow for certain members to make changes and others just to be able to view and stay abreast on a weekly cadence.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Aha is used by our organization as the primary method to manage end-to-end processes in the product management product lifecycle— from idea conception to end-of-life product control. From external, we leverage Aha to create and manage our product roadmaps, from Initiatives to features to stories that are communicated cross-functionally from the marketing to development.
  • 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.
It is perfectly suited to product management processes such as feature creation, story mapping, etc. Where it starts to struggle is when it attempts to be a cross-functional tool for all departments. It is not suited well for teams such as Finance, Marketing and others that are not as linear or rigid in their processes. But as a PM tool, it's nearly perfect.
Susmita Paul | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Aha! is used by a large portion of the company. We use it across the accounts and products teams to keep track of ideas and requests on the products. It's useful as a tool to keep track of feature requests, ask our team members to vote on these ideas, see if the statuses on any of these feature requests change, and write and record comments from other clients. It addresses our previous business problem of having to manually keep track of requests via Google Forms and the spreadsheets the surveys would populate. It's a far easier tool to keep track of and monitor several requests. I honestly don't even remember how we managed before we had Aha!.
  • 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.
Aha! is best suited for a small to medium sized tech company that is looking for an easy way to keep track of feature requests in a simple way that allows us to communicate ideas to each other easily. Having also worked at Athenahealth, a large tech company that had several many more teams, JIRA was ultimately a better tool to combine a request management system with a sprint planning system for teams that work in Agile. Otherwise, Aha! is perfect for where we are as a company and for what we are trying to achieve. One of its best strengths is that it is so easy to use
Himanshu Singh | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Aha! is extensively used by product management team. We as product managers need tools for visualization of our product road maps. Along with it, we want to keep track of it. Aha! is best tool for product road-mapping, no doubt. The types of boards it provide helps product management community in a better way.
  • 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!
If yours is a Product based company and has clear strategy defined for at least a year, Aha! can solve lot of your problems. Aha! gives your Product team a clear idea of how to proceed and where their products are going. The progress, the delays and strategy all are under one umbrella. Best thing is: from top-to-bottom, every product member can work on Aha!.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Aha! is being used in two different ways in our organization. First as a project tracking and timeline tool and secondly as a customer feedback forum. Aha! is malleable enough that it does both well and makes it easy to give the right people the right amount of access so you can incorporate customer feedback alongside internal projects and timelines.
  • 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
Aha! is well suited for strategy and roadmap planning. We use it for our different product launches and the related work with each. Aha! Ideas is also very useful for collecting feedback on those products especially in the beta phase. We collect bugs, product and feature ideas, as well as use Aha! to rank them by vote and order them for release.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Aha is being used by our Product team to help us prioritize work efforts and initiatives across our organization. It is an essential tool for our strategic roadmap efforts.
  • 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.
I would specifically recommend Aha when the need is around roadmapping and the ability to outline strategic priorities and goals. However, it is less suited for project based work and that is often conflated into product management tools. It also lacks resource management, which is why the focus should be strictly with strategic planning.
Jarod Bonino | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Aha! is used at my organization for roadmap planning and idea bank management. It allows product managers a way to product plan, map dependencies, communicate things that ship, and collaborate on strategic direction for our solutions.
  • 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)
Well-suited for strategic release planning and internal stakeholder communication. I would not recommend it for day to day task tracking (although I don't think its intended to be used for that).
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Our product team uses aha.io to document our product strategy, prioritize initiatives, create and track roadmaps, then communicate those outcomes to our engineering team. The main reasons we looked for this kind of tool were:
  1. To organize our thinking using best practices from our product organizations
  2. To separate the product planning work from engineering/construction work we do in JIRA.
  • 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
Great for software product management. Hard to think of too many situations where a PM team couldn't get value from the product. Not well suited if you're cash strapped. Nor if you want something streamlined and simple.
January 26, 2018

Worth the learning curve

Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our organization is using Aha! to help provide transparency across departments. We also use Aha! to collect information about competitors in a centralized location so all reps have access to the same up to date information regarding our competitive advantage.
  • 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.
While I love using Google Docs to collaborate, documents can easily become lost or stale. Aha! helps keep important information at the forefront of the conversation. That being said, it is extremely intimidating to view and there are way too many options to learn about. It's very confusing when you need to edit or add to a collaboration.
Eric Dunne | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have Aha! implemented for different departments across the organization. For me, as a leader, it helps me to see and prioritize everything that is going on as well as manage expectations. We have it integrated with JIRA so it's easy for everyone to work as they normally do while pushing updates up to a 50K foot view.
  • 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.
Aha! is a good overview tool that allows visibility into the many moving parts of my department. Some of the details get lost within each project though and I have to do a lot of clicking in and out of elements to get the information I want.
Leah Sevey | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Currently, every department in our organization is using Aha! Our technical team specifically uses Aha! to break down stories into individual tasks. As the Head of Customer Success, I like that I can monitor when tasks are being worked, when they are completed and I can even recommend new features when I hear ideas directly from customers.
  • 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.
Aha! makes it easy for the entire organization to stay connected. I know what tasks are being worked on, what product tasks will happen next and larger features that we will work on in the next few months. I still have no idea how to use the reports section and I don't personally have tasks represented in Aha!. I find this to be more of a solution for our technical and marketing team. I tend to use software like Zendesk each day to directly assist customer needs.
Jess Hutton | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Aha! in coordination with JIRA - the simplistic, Kanban-style organization is really great for helping non-technical marketing folks visualize their workflows and plan for what's coming next in their queue. We use Aha! across a bunch of different departments, and have really appreciated the internal linking features, the visual orientation of the design, and the extra features like Gantt charts and timeline mapping.
  • 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.
For a marketing team, where we move quickly and are constantly rearranging our tasks and flows, Aha! is an excellent tool. It takes little maintenance, has high visibility of the big picture tasks, and is easy to modify. We did have trouble with more technical teams, like our devs, feeling like it wasn't built for their needs and struggling to implement it.
Ross Reynolds | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We used Aha! across product management, engineering, and management to manage the product backlog and roadmap. We used Aha! primarily for the product view into planning, where engineering used JIRA for project management and support.
  • 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).
  • Aha! is the all around product management tool. You need something once you build out a product management role and grow beyond a small scrum team with one or two products. JIRA, Pivotal, and project management tools don't cut it for aligning [engineering] with product initiatives once the backlog starts to scale.
  • On the other hand, there are several unfinished features that my peers all admit to having to work around: Capacity Planning, Salesforce Integration, Roadmap Display Flexibility, User Feedback, etc. This year has been all about reporting in terms of feature releases. As Aha! grows, they will fill in these other areas, so stay tuned.
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