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.
$59
per month per user
airfocus
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
airfocus offers a modular product management platform. It provides a solution for product teams to manage and communicate their strategy, prioritize their work, build roadmaps, and connect feedback to solve the right problems. Designed with flexibility in mind, airfocus allows users to customize the platform to fit the user's needs without disrupting the way teams works.
airfocus offers a 14-day trial now.
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.
Airfocus is as well suited for large product teams that have several members working on the same product line as it is for a product team of one. For large teams, the collaboration tools that come in the out-of-the-box solution act as a huge timesaver. Frankly speaking, it will help eliminate a lot of resource-intensive face-to-face meetings. For individual managers, the visualization tools can really help organize disparate ideas into a cohesive product roadmap.
One flaw of airfocus is that it fails to live up to its ultimate utility because–like many SaaS products–it is dependent on the entire team, to include all stakeholders, to buy into the solution if it is to be a true one-stop solution for product roadmapping. However, there is no denying it greatly helps in getting teams a little bit closer to the goal of effective collaboration.
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.
Sharing of finished products (e.g., road maps) via downloading or PDF docs could be a bit less high touch than they currently are. The product works best when all stakeholders have a seat but not all stakeholders (i.e. non-product team members) like to work that way, exporting options for them could be better.
Customization (look & feel) options are pretty limited.
JIRA integration only works for JIRA in the cloud customers.
If you have the time and resources there really isn't anything you can't get Aha! to do for you in regards to managing workflow and releases. The Prioritization features are top of its class, the dashboards are getting better and better every day and the team all seem to really enjoy using it to manage their workloads.
When we signed up for Aha!, we were assigned an Aha! team members to help us with training/questions. The meeting was set weekly, and it exponentially helped with our familiarity with Aha! Support is beneficial and has a lot of experience working with product teams.
productboard was used in the organization when I arrived, but after assessing productboard, I felt it was too lightweight for our ambitious product goals. It's also critical, especially in a startup, that we focus our limited capacity on the work that matters most. Aha! far and away had superior capabilities in defining strategy directly in the product and associating all of our work to the strategy. Aha! is a serious product management tool and I found productboard to be more of a simple backlog management tool.
It's easy to use, it's customizable. It is ideal for managing multiple product lists, it is transparent and helps keep any work team centralized. It has an intuitive interface, special to track the time to our established goals.
We know exactly what the impact/effort is of our projects, so we don't waste time on projects or features that won't drive meaningful revenue or increased brand affinity.
