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
productboard
Score 6.6 out of 10
N/A
productboard, from the company of the same name in San Francisco, is a product management system designed to help product managers understand what users need, prioritize what to build, and rally everyone around a roadmap.
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 best feature of productboard is organized features, it has a very simple structure and can be read and understood by anyone. If your roadmap is very dynamic and the executive team needs to be on top of it, productboard is the best application out there. But if you have a small product and features do not change very often, then maybe you can look at other alternatives since productboard is expensive.
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.
I have previously used Aha another product road mapping/ insights driven software. Aha had great features for the userbase of my previous products. They were allowed to create their own suggestions for the products and other users could then like or dislike the suggestion. This created a real reflection on need for product enhancements. productboard handles this slightly differently. Each user creates their own suggestions and doesn't necessarily have visibility on other users suggestions. The product/ R&D team can then tag suggestions together into the same overall suggestion. This requires more input from product/R&D with productboard. I would however, suggest that productboard is better than Aha. Aha is great for an external user point of view; however, there may be case for users to not have visibility on wider user requirements. productboard keeps more of this element hidden and would perhaps stir up less negative correlation to seeing a system requirement/suggest having had a lot of traffic and no action, compared to a more closed system that would individually update each user on the enhancement progress.
