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
Craft.io
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Craft, from the company of the same name in Tel Aviv, is presented by the vendor as a better way for Product Managers to manage and plan their products in agile environment.
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.
Craft.io is well suited for medium to large digital product teams that have some experience with the tools and features of the agile and lean models. Users that are new to those methodologies can have some difficulties understanding the platform. It is less appropriate for small projects too. It's a great tool but I think you can shape a project management tool to your needs in theses cases and it will work better.
'Sync' usually works flawlessly in syncing my artboards to Invision. Once you set up the plugin, I can easily forget about tinkering with any of the settings - it just 'works'.
'Library' is pretty great for generating a style guide from my design doc. Clicking one button makes magic happen, and creates a super succinct document for me to share between teammates and other teams.
'Data' also works wonders when trying to approximate 'real' data into a static design. It turns the painful job of having to fill in designs with 'real-world' data a piece of cake. It helps me validate rough designs using an actual approximation of real content.
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.
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.
Craft has a completely unique tool set that has functionality that really is not duplicated any where else in the industry. It cannot really be compared to any other tool I have had experience with, especially with the larger cloud infrastructure that Invision has built around their plugin and their platform.
