Aha! Roadmaps vs. Digital.ai Agility

• 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.

Digital.ai Agility is an ideal tool for anyone who is looking to track the work of a software development team following agile processes. It easily supports multiple teams with multiple backlogs, but also allows aggregation and rollup across those teams for larger analysis and planning.

Incentivized

• 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

• Automated saving of changes, no records can be lost because all items are saved in real-time.
• The watch function, optional but beneficial when managing multiple teams or projects.

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

• Saving of changes is inconsistent. Sometimes the changes appear to save automatically and other times the user needs to click the "Apply" button. Until the user is familiar with when this needs to happen, work can easily be lost.
• This may be a setup configuration issue, but it would be good to be able to set the default team when creating stories. Too often stories are created and the user forgets to enter the team and they need to search the entire database for the story that was just created.

Incentivized

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

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

VersionOne provides outstanding training. They have Product Owner training that I recommend every Product Owner attend. They have scrum master training and other agile training that was well worth the money paid because it made the teams more productive. And the support for the tool is incredible. These people live and breathe Agile and are evangelists and enthusiasts.

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

We considered rally & AgileCraft since they also provides good support to SAFe framework. Though I personally found Rally better equipped but Rally was rejected due to its higher cost. AgileCraft & Version One provides many common features i.e Team Rooms, Planning Rooms, Capabilities Kanban, Road mapping but Version One support for collaboration tools & its seamless integration with GitHub played key role in going with Version One.

Incentivized

• 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

• At first, it was difficult for the teams as we were learning Agile and VersionOne. But VersionOne provided us with great training and support. As such the teams were able to quickly adopt and embrace Agile.
• Our teams are now more efficient.
• Our time to market has decreased significantly.

Incentivized