Aha! Roadmaps | Getting started

Are you ready to start building strategic roadmaps? This video is a great place to start. It gives you an overview of the entire Aha! Roadmaps product — from setting strategy to capturing ideas and prioritizing work.

Click below to watch the video, or scroll down to follow along with a transcript!

Transcript

Hi, this is Claire from Aha! Today I'm going to show you how Aha will help you set strategy, prioritize work, and create visual roadmaps. Let's get started.

Aha! is structured around the why, which is the strategy, the when, which releases and the what, which is the work and your planning process. This comes before the how, which is the actual implementation of the work.

Workspaces

All Aha! workspaces have the same core functionality for setting strategy, capturing ideas, prioritizing work, and sharing visual roadmaps. When you create a new workspace in Aha!, choose the one that best reflects the type of strategic planning that you want to do — product, IT, project, services, business, or marketing.

• You can create as many workspaces as you need and customize them to match how your team works.

• Add your teammates and give them different roles.

Strategy

Strategy answers the why. This is your big picture context and true north for what you will build.

Let's start with Foundation. Here you can set your vision, define your market landscape using strategic models, and capture your products benefits with positioning.

Market is where you capture personas and evaluate how you measure up against your competitors.

Imperatives are where you track your goals and initiatives.

• Goals are the time-bound, measurable objectives that you want to accomplish. Here you can see an example goal of tripling revenue year over year with a success metric increasing revenue by $50 million this fiscal year.

• Initiatives are a link between your strategy and what you plan to build. These are high-level themes of work that will help you accomplish your goals.

Releases

Releases define exactly how work will get done and when. Build out cross-functional plans and releases, the features and activities, and create templates to bring consistency to your team's work. You can also have dependencies to keep track of what happens when dates change. The calendar view is ideal for seeing days ahead to what is coming next.

Ideas

Let's give your customers and partners a voice. Bring them into the planning process with an ideas portal. Ideas portals can be custom branded and made public to customers or private to audiences such as partners or employees. Now you can easily keep track of all those suggestions and requests from your customers and your team.

The ideas overview shows submitted ideas where you can begin reviewing and prioritizing everything that comes in. Then you can promote the best ideas directly to your roadmap. As work progresses, ideas will trigger automatic notifications to those who voted, letting them know the status and completing the feedback loop.

Features

Strategy is set and ideas have been reviewed. Now you can define a prioritize what to build on the planning board. This is where many teams spend most of their time in Aha! It's the place where you go to define and manage all of your planned work, as well as organize your backlog in the Aha! parking lot.

You can create custom workflows, statuses, and layouts in your feature and activity cards to match how your team works. Use the Aha! Score to determine how important any individual feature or activity really is. You control the scorecard metrics, scale, and weighting. Customize it to reflect what you'll deliver on your strategic goals. The Aha! Score for each feature and activity is visible here on each card, making it easy to prioritize your planned work based on the strategic importance.

The workflow board is a kanban-style view that is ideal for visualizing the team's progress.

Roadmaps

Now it is time to build and share your visual roadmaps.

The starter roadmap is a great starting place. Any records you create and updates you make in the starter roadmap view are reflected everywhere in your workspace.

For a more detailed roadmap, you can show features by release and customize details such as status and external dates.

Reports

Aha! comes with a powerful reporting engine, quickly create everything from simple lists to more advanced charts and pivot tables. You can report on nearly every data element in your Aha! account then tailor that report to include the exact information you need.

Presentations

All of these roadmaps and views can be published and added to a presentation. You can even set these views to automatically update as your plans evolve or share out any views as a webpage with just one click. Give your leadership team, partners, and customers access to the most up-to-date information in an easy-to-flip-through format.

Integrations

It is easy to connect Aha! with other tools your company already uses. Choose from more than 30 integrations, including Jira, Slack, Salesforce, and Zendesk.

This is just the start of what is possible with Aha! If you need help, use the question mark in your account. Get started today with a free 30-day trial or join one of our live weekly demos. Our Product Success team is all former product managers and our Aha! experts. We want to help you build beautiful robots and get meaningful work done.