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Aha.io provides all the necessary tools (and much more) to manage product delivery throughout the whole lifecycle. It supports all modern ways of working and could be tuned for the needs of your organisation.
Product vision, strategy and goals
There are multiple ways people communicate their product strategy. Some like canvases, while others prefer text, graphs or even spreadsheets. Whatever your preferred way to think about your strategy - Aha.io has you covered. I am yet to see more sophisticated options for figuring out the strategic parts of your product.In Aha.io you can start with creating your product vision - it's presented on a graph and provides a clear, engaging way for your employees and stakeholders to understand where you're going. Don't like the default way? No problem, you can create a lean canvas, SWOT, 10P marketing matrix and many more. In addition, Aha.io also gives you handy tools to create personas for your product, positioning documents, list your initiatives and goals. It even enables you to collect competitors' intelligence and have it as input for your strategic preparations.
Product discovery
Every good product starts with ideas. To capture and effectively discover those ideas you have multiple tools in Aha.io at your disposal. First and foremost, there is a feedback portal. Like in some other tools I've reviewed, Aha.io allows you to create both private and public feedback portals where your customers and stakeholders can add ideas, problems and anything that could be useful for you to serve them.I found managing the feedback portal in Aha.io very simple and intuitive. It allows you to build a workflow and ensure that the feedback is not only collected but regularly reviewed by your PMs and acted upon. While you're busy discovering your reporters and collaborators will be kept up to date with the progress.
In addition to the feedback portal, Aha.io offers some of the more advanced tools for including your customers and stakeholders in the process of developing the product. More on that is in the "Special sauce" section.
Prioritisation
Any seasoned PM will tell you - there is always too much to do, hence prioritising work is the most critical in any product org. Aha.io has just the right features for that across the whole lifecycle. Firstly, it allows you to prioritise feedback and ideas using crowdsourcing (voting) as well as internal assessment. Later, when you turned ideas into features - Aha.io offers you multiple prioritisation techniques to support your decision-making.Priorities could be assigned during a brainstorming session and nicely visualised for your team and stakeholders to see.
Planning
At first, planning in Aha.io scared me because the default view is a Gantt chart. Anyone who's been in the industry for a while has a light form of PTSD after dealing with Gantt charts. And yet, plenty of managers still prefer to use it for project planning. At least, in Aha.io Gantt chart is customisable so if you want you can turn it into a much more user-friendly timeline view for your deliverables.Then I discovered more modern tools to plan your work in Aha.io. One of the most useful is user story mapping which supports the method of the same name. It's better to do user story mapping in a workshop with your entire team. Aha.io could help digitise your maps and collaborate with remote teams while delivering the work.
What I couldn't find in Aha.io planning tools is how to link a release or a set of features to a squad or a team that is tasked to deliver them. This makes capacity planning a problem and creates much more work for PMs. I did see capacity planning as a feature for their Enterprise plan so that's might be a reason I didn't see how it works in my demo.
Product delivery
Tracking product delivery is not as simple in Aha.io as in some of the other similar tools. Yes, you have a release Gantt chart and your roadmap, however, it's not immediately clear how can you get up-to-date status on your deliverables. I suspect this is something Aha.io might be offering in higher tiers and you'd definitely need to set up an integration with your software delivery tool.Still, with some additional work from PMs, you should be able to adequately report the status of your delivery in Aha.io. It's the only tool I saw to date that offers robust reporting capabilities allowing you to visualise and share the status of your work items and plans for the future.
Roadmap
Aha.io supports all major timeline and column-based roadmaps. It means you can visualise your plans any way you want starting from a simple "Now, Next, Later" to an elaborate Gantt with all dependencies and connections.Different roadmap views could be saved and shared with the right audience both internally and externally. You can even share your roadmap as a webpage connected to your ideas portal and thus far complete the cycle of discovery - delivery - feedback.
Integrations
Aha.io offers integrations with all the major tools used for discovery and delivery. On the discovery side, Aha.io integrates with User voice, Trello, Slack, Miro and many other tools popular during this stage of product development. On the delivery side, the usual dev tools are available such as Jira, Azure and Github. Additionally, you can integrate Aha.io with your CRM, analytics solution and much more.Unfortunately, due to the nature of my demo, I couldn't test the depth and quality of the integrations offered.
Special sauce
If you're serious about product discovery, and you should be, then Aha.io might surprise you with the depth of useful ideation tools it offers. In the standard package, you have access to the feedback portal, prioritisation and reporting on ideas. That's a lot already, but that's not all Aha.io has to offer. In their "Ideas advanced" plan you'll find some very clever tools that would help you to understand your customers better."Segments" will help you to group your customers based on shared characteristics or behaviours. "Organisations" will be really useful for B2B folks who need to know their customers really well in order to delight them. It doesn't quite replace CRM but provides the most important insights to serve your business customers right. If you want, you can even go deeper and collect intelligence about an individual user or a contact (as it's called in Aha.io). You'll know about all the feedback this customer provided, what segment they belong to and so you'll be able to prioritise better.
And even that is not all Aha.io has to offer in the "Ideas" section. For researchers, they have a few more cool capabilities, such as polls, empathy sessions and in-app feedback. You can create quite a feature-rich survey for your customers or prospects. Empathy sessions are focus-group-like events where you can learn from several of your clients at once. And in-app feedback is like a light version of Intercom - a chat that pop-ups for your customers while they are using your product. That way you can capture their vital thoughts right there and then when they happen.
Conclusion
Aha.io is a comprehensive, enterprise-level product management tool offering some of the most advanced capabilities for larger product teams. Even in their basic plan, you have access to powerful product discovery and planning tools that would satisfy mid-sized and large portfolios.Product discovery is where Aha.io excels by offering not only the usual feedback options but also providing tools for B2B-focused orgs out there and even for researchers that otherwise would need to use other software.
Product planning and roadmapping could be performed in Aha.io on different levels. With a bit of tuning, both simple and more advanced prioritisation and planning techniques are supported. The results of your work could be easily shared both internally and externally.
Perhaps because Aha.io offers so many options their interface might appear clunky and old-fashioned. It might also require a substantial effort to set up the workspace correctly and so it should be done by experienced product ops or a seasoned PM.
Finally, there are still not so many PM tools that could support a massive product org and Aha.io probably got the closest to doing it. If you have hundreds of PMs, even more products and strong product ops - Aha.io should be the right kind of tool for you.
Pros
- Enterprise-level tool capable of running the entire SDLC
- One-stop shop to create and communicate your product vision and strategy
- Feature-rich product discovery module
- Simple and advanced prioritisation with rich roadmapping capabilities
- Robust reporting
Cons
- Gantt charts in 202x?
- UI feels dated
- Requires extensive setup before use
- Delivery tracking is not obvious