Aha! Roadmaps vs. Asana

• 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.

The usability of Asana is broad since it's available in a variety of platforms that are widely used nowadays. I think that it would be great for people who are constantly on the move and switching devices, since it has allowed me to work from my phone, too. I also think that Asana has proven itself to handle a large quantity of work

• 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.

Incentivized

• Easy to use by any user (good UX and no installation needed)
• Easy to create a simple project, add tasks and sub tasks.
• Different display options, according to the project/tasks type
• Works great using a web browser, you don't have to install the application

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Some users might find the user interface a bit dull and un inspired
• We found the way to use multiple workspaces a bit confusing
• It takes quite a bit of planning to build a well organized workspace in order not to have way too many projects and tasks all over the place

Incentivized

I just can't see us getting it off of Asana any time soon, despite the many headaches it has caused us. We have too much data in there, too much time & training invested into it, too much at stake to move. If we were just starting out today, fresh, I don't know for certain that I would absolutely go the same direction, but I *think* I still would. I just haven't seen anything better yet. Maybe if Podio's support staff hadn't treated me like a worthless nuisance to them, I might feel differently, but the fact is that their task management is simply inferior to Asana's. That can't be denied, and in fact Podio said it themselves: "Tasks are a simple function. They cannot be customized. Tasks in Podio can be used for quick to-do's for you and your team members." In our operation, however, prompt task completion is a big deal; one task can't be completed until another one is done first, and closing the gaps between those tasks is critical in meeting deadlines and servicing our customers. Asana gets us there, the others don't.

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.

Incentivized

It is very user-friendly. Takes a new employee an hour to start figuring out how the system works. That's an important factor. You don't want to encounter the issue where employees need a week to understand how the system works. For example, JIRA, I tried using it for a week and I still don't understand the complicated layout. Asana has a simple interface. Once you see it, you get it type of program.

Incentivized

Working with Asana on a daily basis

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.

Incentivized

I haven't had to use their support so I can't rate it. The fact that I haven't needed them reflects the ease of use of the product. I would recommend that any new users schedule a complete demo of the product to ensure that they are using it to it's fullest (there's a lot of useful features).

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Asana is a top-tier project management software that helps us organize and track projects from start to finish. It allows us to apply tasks/to-dos to multiple projects without duplication, divide complex projects into smaller tasks, and track project progress. It also helps us organize work on Kanban boards or linear lists. It stands out from the crowd in a big way compared to the competition.

I used this tool on a daily basis at work and it runs as a solid rock

• It has been able to deliver a good overall view of all the items we have going on in ADO.
• We are in the process of transforming from waterfall to agile development and to be able to see an overall picture of the work items is invaluable.

Incentivized

• Difficulty adding large projects with multiple and complex levels of tasks.
• The number of users is limited in the free version. The service cannot be used for groups of less than 5 people.
• The search filter is not a powerful feature, it needs some development and strength because it contains some bugs sometimes.