Roadmap

What is Aha! Roadmaps

Aha! Roadmaps is a complete software solution for product management teams. Its main purpose is to help product managers set strategy, capture ideas, prioritize features, and create visual roadmaps to share with stakeholders. The platform provides a single, centralized place for all product-related activities, from high-level goal setting to detailed release planning. It is designed to connect the work the team is doing directly to the overall business strategy. Aha! Roadmaps is a product from Aha! Labs Inc., a company founded in 2013 by Brian de Haaff and Dr. Chris Waters. The company is headquartered in Menlo Park, California, and operates with a fully remote team.

Aha! Roadmaps Features

• Strategy Setting: Define your product vision, goals, and initiatives. This feature allows you to build a strategic framework that connects your business objectives to the work your team performs.
• Roadmap Creation: Build many types of roadmaps using pre-built templates. You can create strategy roadmaps, feature roadmaps, and release Gantt charts. These roadmaps are dynamic and update in real time.
• Idea Management: Collect feedback and ideas from customers, employees, and other stakeholders through a custom-branded portal. You can score ideas to identify which ones have the highest impact.
• Feature Prioritization: Use scoring metrics to objectively evaluate features. The tool provides a prioritization view to compare features based on their value and effort, helping you decide what to build next.
• Release Planning: Manage all details of product releases. You can plan the scope and timing of launches, track cross-team dependencies, and get alerts about potential delivery risks.
• AI Assistant: Use artificial intelligence to help with tasks like summarizing customer feedback, refining feature requirements, and creating product documentation.
• Whiteboards: Collaborate with your team in real time using digital whiteboards. Brainstorm new concepts, map user flows, and turn ideas into actionable work items on your roadmap.
• Reporting and Analytics: Track progress against your goals with detailed reports and dashboards. The software includes over 75 pre-built reports to visualize data on product KPIs, progress, and team capacity.

Aha! Roadmaps Pricing Plans

Aha! Roadmaps offers several pricing plans designed for different team sizes and needs. There is no specific price information, but the plans are structured in tiers.

• Premium Plan: This plan is ideal for most product teams. It includes all the core features needed for setting strategy, building roadmaps, prioritizing features, and planning releases.
• Enterprise Plan: Suited for larger organizations that need more advanced capabilities. This tier adds features like capacity planning for teams, advanced security controls, and custom workflows.
• Enterprise+ Plan: This is the most comprehensive plan for large enterprises with complex portfolio management needs. It includes features for managing a portfolio of products, financial planning, and advanced customization options.

Aha! Roadmaps Free Plan

Aha! Roadmaps does not offer a permanent free plan. However, it provides a 30-day free trial for new users. The trial gives you full access to all the features of the chosen plan, allowing you to test the software completely. You can invite your team members to collaborate during the trial period. A credit card is not required to start the trial.

How to use Aha! Roadmaps

Getting started with Aha! Roadmaps involves a few key steps to set up your product management process.

1. Set Your Strategy: Begin by defining your product vision, goals, and initiatives. This creates the foundation for all your future work and ensures everyone is aligned.
2. Capture Ideas: Use the ideas portal to collect feedback from customers and internal teams. Review and score these ideas to find the most valuable ones.
3. Define Features: Promote the best ideas into features. Write detailed requirements, add mockups, and use the AI assistant to refine the user experience.
4. Prioritize Your Backlog: Use the prioritization view and a value scorecard to rank features objectively. This helps you decide which features to work on next.
5. Build Your Roadmap: Choose a roadmap template and add your prioritized features and initiatives. Customize the view for different audiences, such as executives or engineering teams.
6. Plan Releases: Organize features into releases. Use the Gantt chart view to schedule the work, manage dependencies between teams, and set realistic delivery dates.
7. Track Progress: As the engineering team completes work, update the status in Aha! Roadmaps. Use dashboards and reports to monitor progress and share updates with stakeholders.

Pros and Cons of Aha! Roadmaps

Pros:

• All-in-One Solution: It combines strategy, roadmapping, idea management, and release planning in one tool.
• Strong Strategy Focus: It excels at linking day-to-day work back to high-level business goals.
• Highly Customizable: You can tailor workflows, terminology, and layouts to fit your team's process.
• Powerful Reporting: Offers a wide range of pre-built reports and dashboards for tracking progress and KPIs.
• Excellent Integrations: Connects seamlessly with many popular engineering and business tools.

Cons:

• Steep Learning Curve: The large number of features can be overwhelming for new users.
• Can be Expensive: The pricing may be high for small startups or individual product managers.
• Complex Interface: Some users find the user interface to be dense and not as intuitive as simpler tools.

Aha! Roadmaps integrations

Aha! Roadmaps integrates with over 40 tools to connect your product management workflow with other systems. Key integrations include:

• Jira: A deep, two-way integration to send prioritized features to engineering and receive real-time status updates.
• Azure DevOps: Sync records between Aha! Roadmaps and Azure DevOps to keep product and development teams aligned.
• Salesforce: Capture customer feedback and requests directly from Salesforce and link them to your product plans.
• Zendesk: Integrate with Zendesk to centralize product feedback from customer support tickets.
• Slack: Receive notifications and share roadmap updates directly within your Slack channels.
• GitHub: Connect your product plans with your development workflow in GitHub.
• Trello: Send work from your roadmap to Trello boards for teams that use a simpler project management tool.

Aha! Roadmaps Alternatives

• Productboard: A strong alternative that focuses heavily on collecting customer feedback and linking it to feature prioritization. It is excellent for user-centric product teams.
• Roadmunk: Known for its user-friendly interface and powerful roadmap visualization capabilities. It is simpler than Aha! Roadmaps and is a good choice for teams who need to create beautiful, shareable roadmaps quickly.
• Jira Product Discovery: A good option for teams already heavily invested in the Atlassian ecosystem. It offers native integration with Jira Software for a seamless workflow between product discovery and development.
• Craft.io: A comprehensive product management tool that provides features for strategy, roadmapping, prioritization, and feedback management, similar to Aha! Roadmaps.

Aha! Roadmaps API

Aha! Roadmaps provides a comprehensive REST API that allows developers to interact with their Aha! account data programmatically. You can use the API to create, read, update, and delete most records, including goals, features, and ideas.

To use the API, you need to generate an API key from your personal settings within your Aha! account. The API documentation is available on the Aha! developer portal.

Here is a simple example using cURL to fetch features for a product:

curl -X GET \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer <YOUR_API_KEY>" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  "https://your-company.aha.io/api/v1/products/PROD-1/features"

Aha! Roadmaps Affiliate program

Aha! Roadmaps does not have a public, commission-based affiliate program for general users. However, they do have a Partner Program for consultants and service providers who help organizations implement product development best practices. If you are interested in partnership opportunities, it is best to contact their team directly through their website to discuss potential collaborations.