Aha!

What is Aha!

Aha! is a complete product development software suite designed for product and engineering teams. Its core purpose is to provide a single environment for setting product strategy, capturing customer ideas, creating visual roadmaps, and managing the development lifecycle. The platform helps teams connect their work to strategic goals, ensuring that everyone is building what customers truly value. Aha! was founded in 2013 by Brian de Haaff and Dr. Chris Waters. The company is fully remote but has its headquarters in Menlo Park, California. It is known for its bootstrapped growth and strong focus on customer-driven development.

Aha! Features

Aha! offers a suite of integrated products, each with specific features:

• Aha! Roadmaps: This tool helps you set strategy with goals and initiatives. You can build and share visual roadmaps, prioritize features with scoring, and manage releases.
• Aha! Ideas: Centralize all customer feedback in one place. It provides idea portals where users can submit requests, vote on ideas, and see what is being planned.
• Aha! Whiteboards: A collaborative space for teams to brainstorm. You can create diagrams, user flows, wireframes, and mockups to explore new concepts together.
• Aha! Knowledge: Build and manage a central knowledge base for your product. This is useful for sharing product documentation, user guides, and internal information.
• Aha! Develop: An agile development tool designed for engineering teams. It connects directly to the product roadmap, allowing teams to manage backlogs, plan sprints, and optimize their workload.
• Aha! Create: A set of digital notebooks and whiteboards for personal note-taking and early-stage ideation before it becomes a formal plan.
• AI Assistant (Ha!): Integrated across the suite, this AI assistant helps with tasks like summarizing customer feedback, drafting strategic documents, and refining user stories.

Aha! Pricing Plans

Aha! offers several pricing plans based on the products you choose. You can subscribe to individual products like Roadmaps, Ideas, or Develop, or bundle them together for a complete suite. Each product has different tiers, typically including a Premium plan for growing teams and an Enterprise plan for larger organizations that need more advanced features like custom workflows, advanced security, and dedicated support. The pricing is usually on a per-user basis, allowing companies to scale their subscription as their team grows. This model provides flexibility for companies to choose only the tools they need.

Aha! Free Plan

Aha! does not offer a permanent free plan for its core products like Roadmaps or Develop. However, it provides a full-featured 30-day free trial for all its products. During the trial, you get complete access to the features of the plan you select, allowing you to evaluate the software thoroughly. There are no limitations on features or the number of users during the trial period. They also offer some completely free tools, such as Aha! Create for individual use.

How to use Aha!

Getting started with Aha! involves a few key steps to align your team and product strategy:

1. Sign Up and Set Up: Start by signing up for a free trial and selecting the Aha! products your team needs.
2. Define Your Strategy: Begin by setting your product vision, goals, and strategic initiatives. This provides the 'why' behind your work.
3. Build Your Roadmap: Create a visual roadmap by adding releases and features. Link these features back to your strategic goals to show how they contribute to the bigger picture.
4. Capture Ideas: Set up an ideas portal to collect feedback from customers, partners, and internal teams. Review, comment on, and promote valuable ideas directly to your roadmap.
5. Prioritize Work: Use the feature scoring system to prioritize what to build next based on value and effort.
6. Collaborate and Plan: Use whiteboards for brainstorming sessions and create detailed specifications for features.
7. Integrate and Execute: Connect Aha! with your development tool (like Jira or Azure DevOps) to send prioritized features to the engineering team for implementation. Progress is then synced back to Aha! for visibility.

Pros and Cons of Aha!

Pros:

• Comprehensive Suite: It offers a complete set of tools for the entire product development lifecycle, from ideation to delivery.
• Strategy-First Approach: The software strongly emphasizes connecting daily work to high-level business goals.
• Excellent Roadmapping: Provides powerful and flexible options for creating and sharing visual roadmaps.
• Robust Integrations: Seamlessly connects with popular development, communication, and support tools.
• Great Customer Support: The support team is known for being responsive and knowledgeable, often staffed by former product managers.

Cons:

• Steep Learning Curve: The platform is feature-rich, which can be overwhelming for new users.
• High Cost: Pricing can be expensive, especially for small startups or teams with limited budgets.
• Complex UI: The user interface can feel dense and less modern compared to some newer competitors.

Aha! integrations

Aha! offers a wide range of integrations to connect your product management workflow with other tools your teams use. This helps to automate processes and ensure data is consistent across platforms.

• Jira Integration: A deep, two-way integration allows you to send features and requirements from Aha! to Jira and get real-time status updates back.
• Azure DevOps Integration: Similar to Jira, this integration syncs work items between Aha! and Azure DevOps, keeping product and engineering teams aligned.
• Salesforce Integration: Link customer feedback and revenue opportunities from Salesforce to ideas and features in Aha! to prioritize work that impacts the business.
• Zendesk Integration: Capture product feedback from customer support tickets in Zendesk and manage it within Aha! Ideas.
• Slack Integration: Receive notifications about updates in Aha! directly in your Slack channels to keep everyone informed.
• GitHub Integration: Connect development work in GitHub to your product plans in Aha! for better visibility.

Aha! Alternatives

• Productboard: A strong competitor focused on centralizing customer feedback and linking it to product features. It is often praised for its user-friendly interface for insight collection.
• Jira Product Discovery: A good alternative for teams heavily invested in the Atlassian ecosystem. It offers tight integration with Jira Software for a seamless workflow.
• Roadmunk: Known for its excellent and easy-to-use roadmap visualization tools. It is a great choice if your primary need is creating beautiful, shareable roadmaps.
• Craft.io: An all-in-one product management platform that provides tools for strategy, feedback management, roadmapping, and spec writing. It positions itself as a complete system of record for product teams.
• Pendo: While also focused on product analytics and user engagement, Pendo offers roadmapping and feedback tools that serve as an alternative for data-driven teams.

Aha! API

Aha! provides a comprehensive REST API that allows developers to interact with their Aha! account data programmatically. You can use the API to build custom integrations, automate workflows, and pull data for custom reporting. The API covers most of the data objects in Aha!, including ideas, features, releases, and roadmaps.

To use the API, you need to generate an API key. You can do this from your personal settings within your Aha! account under Settings → Personal → API key. The key should be kept secure.

Here is a basic example of how to use the API with cURL to fetch features for a product:

curl -X GET \
  "https://your-company.aha.io/api/v1/products/{product_id}/features" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json"

Aha! Affiliate program

Aha! does not have a traditional public affiliate program where individuals can earn a commission for referrals through a link. Instead, they focus on a Partner Program for consultants and organizations that help companies implement product management best practices. They also have a customer referral program where existing customers can get rewards for referring new clients. If you are interested in partnership opportunities, it is best to contact their support or sales team directly to discuss potential collaborations.