Share Visual Roadmaps With Customers via Ideas Portals

Eighteen thousand ideas portals. Three million ideas. Altogether our customers collect an incredible amount of information from their own customers via portals in Aha! Ideas. And it is a good thing — knowing what customers want is essential for product teams to build and create value.

Until now, ideas portals in Aha! Ideas have been (mostly) a one-way channel. Your customers submit requests and you route them through your idea management process. It is indispensable for innovation. But we saw an opportunity to create more of a bi-directional communication flow. Now ideas portals are a place where you can proactively publish product plans too.

You can now share roadmaps and announcements directly to your ideas portal in Aha! Ideas — using new custom portal pages.

A healthy ideas portal is full of great feedback from customers. Now you can send meaningful updates about your product plans right where your customers are already engaged. Display a roadmap, report, or note via a custom page in your ideas portal. This encourages your community to keep returning to share their input and see what is coming next.

Custom portal pages are available in the Aha! Ideas Advanced plan. A customizations admin can add them to your account in portal settings. As part of this update, we also made our powerful notes functionality available to all Aha! Ideas users — you can find it within the Research tab of your account. If you use Ideas Advanced and Aha! Roadmaps together, you can embed any choice of roadmap views.

Here are a few ways to expand the value of your portal with custom pages:

Share your roadmap

Start by defining the information you want to share in your ideas portal. Here, we want to give customers a view of upcoming features. We built a features roadmap and selected exactly which releases and features we want to show. Choose the option to enable sharing in your ideas portal. Once the roadmap is live, a green label appears in the top right of the view to indicate that any changes will be automatically shared.

Document release notes

You may also have other product news you want to share. Notes are ideal for consolidating announcements and even documenting your feedback review process for customers. In the example below, we created monthly release notes to share with customers. You have an option to share a single note or a group of nested notes to a custom portal page.

Publish your custom pages

Once you have prepared the perfect views for your audience, it is time to make them visible in your portal. Create custom pages in the new pages section of your ideas portal settings. Choose the roadmap or note that you want to share and include a custom heading and description. Here we added a custom page to share all the 2021 release notes we created in the previous step.

Keep customers in the know

Let's take a look at our collection of new pages from the perspective of the portal user. In our example, a user will land on the idea submission page first. From there, they can reference a portal user guide, see a live roadmap for the first half of the year, and catch up on release notes. Anyone who is able to access your portal can view the custom pages you create.

Reciprocate the gift of all the feedback you receive by showing people where your product is headed. This way, everyone gets the information they really need.

Now your community has even more reasons to visit your ideas portal and get all the latest updates. So go ahead and start sharing your plans in your ideas portal. We would love to hear which roadmaps and notes you decide are the most valuable to share with your customers.

Start a free trial today — be happy.

If you are not already an Aha! customer, you may want to sign up for a free 30-day trial of Aha! Ideas and Aha! Roadmaps. You can also join a live demo to see why more than 500,000 users trust our software to build lovable products.