Aha! - The All-Around Product Management Suite

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).