Aha! Reviews

Aha is the most powerful and full-featured product management solution on the market, and most of what it aims to do, it does well.

It integrates with nearly everything, and provides enormous flexibility in how you choose to setup your workflow. It also provides good tutorials and and blog posts to help understand how to set up and use the software.

As well as providing essential features such as feature (& epic) backlog, roadmaps, and release planning, it also provides structure to help define top-down strategy, with its templates such as business canvas, SWOT, 5 factors, and its structure for defining goals and strategic initiatives.

It has quite a steep learning curve, by virtue of being so configurable, and offering so much functionality. Figuring out the best way to use it, even with tutorial & primer resources, can be time consuming.

The lack of true Zenhub integration has been a pain point for us.

It is also quite expensive - and it will add up as you inevitably add more users, since there will be impetus to convert Reviewer accounts into paid seats over time - you simply get more/better participation from users that have read/write access to features, epics, releases, roadmap etc.

Aha has allowed us to have a single view of what were previously more disparate projects, and apply top-down strategy to them to move them closer to a true product line. The multiple integrations supported also played well with our organizations often heterogenous processes and preferred tools - such a single view, integrating all of our external sources of truth, would be impossible to build in most other tools.

I've never worked with a company that was so keen to help. A favorite exchange was when I was reporting a bug after a new release. My original support person went off shift and someone else took over the chat. I thought "it's okay for the guy to go home and have dinner!" The software itself helps us organize our product priorities like never before and multiple times a new release has gone out and I felt like Aha was reading my mind and solving my problems before I could even ask.

It can be challenging for our users (non Product Managers) to navigate and find what they are looking for. I just tell them to use the search capabilities, and that it's not really a system well-suited for poking around in.

take advantage of the trial and support!

We needed a way to manage and visualize how our development work connects to our business strategy.

The tool is focused on high level strategic planning, as opposed to detailed project and task planning, but also offers a way to link the two. For us, the Initiatives, Goals, Scorecard and Releases features look very promising for us to achieve the strategy tracking improvements we are after.

The first thing that drew our attention to Aha! was the varied selection of reports available out of the box, most of which are customizable. The ability to group products into product lines and create report views by these is a very strong feature. This allows us to create views for specific teams, tribes or entire portfolio.

We have not tried the Jira integration but we think that will allow us to keep our detailed planning in Jira, while adding a more consolidated high level view of things.

As a SaaS solution it is easy to get started without much upfront cost and effort. Some of the alternative tools we considered reusing from our existing portfolio required more config and setup to implement the portfolio we want to manage.

We were able to build out our portfolio on Aha! pretty much on our won without contacting the Aha! support team. We plan to use their help for the more advanced features. The support team has been reaching out to us periodically during the trial period.

Some mid-level user documentation might be useful. If it exists, I did not find it easily, but there are a few good intro videos and you can always ask the support team on specific questions.

More info on the report options and capabilities would be useful. We learned by clicking around to see what happened. But we found some really good reports and some that didn't work so well because we were missing part of the data setup.

I noticed some minor UI slow down after using it for a while.

Have a good idea of what portfolio you want to model. If this is clear, putting into the Aha! tools is fairly quick and easy.

After using it as a trial we believe this tool has a lot of potential for us for managing an IT application portfolio.

We were able to model our PLM IT application portfolio in the way we manage it by using product lines, initiatives and goals. We strongly believe that Aha! will help us manage our PLM strategy at a high level, with idea and initiative tracking, without the project planning details we already have in Jira, but plan to use the integration to link the two levels of planning.

We aim to reduce the time we spend manually maintaining strategic roadmaps in Power Point and Excel, and use instead the time to analyze our portfolio more effectively by using the various ways Aha! reports and pivots.

We also plan to use the scorecard feature, to track business value on our roadmap items. This will be an improvement to how we do strategic planning in our team.

The ability to have a shared roadmap, in a cloud tool meant to do just that across my organization. Before we had a Aha!, there were tons of spreadsheets and slides flying around and even if they were on cloud tools, there was no common understanding of what was oficially on the roadmap. With Aha! that has changed in only a couple of months. I can't wait to see the additional value we can extract.

Aha!, in my opinion, is the most robust option out there. There a few tools that I tried that have nice visualization options, but nowhere near the power and flexibility of Aha!

Aha! is so powerful and so customizable that it took me a while to figure out how best to apply it to my particular situations and challenges. That said, their amazing customer success team has been and continues to work patiently and diligently to help me make the most out of it.

Centrally acknowledged, accesible by everyone company wide product roadmap. This has helped me get aligment across the company and make it obvious to distinct stakeholders where we have staffing or expectations gaps

Solutions roadmaps for customer specific solutions. This is a great way to communicate to customers how their specific projects are coming along.

Ability to tie every project to a corporate goal

We use Aha! for ideation and generation of features from our internal and external contributors. We like the ability to give our contributors a portal for easy access to submit, comment, vote and follow up on ideas. The contributor might not always know the best fit for an idea, we like the ability to move ideas between product lines with the click of the mouse. We started using the road map feature to better inform our upper level management of our progress. We are really excited about the integration with Azure DevOps. As a development team, we rely heavily on DevOps and the integration allows us to reduce the data entry aspect. The development team can comment in their system and the contributor can answer in Aha!, this creates a seamless flow. Overall, for the past year, we have been learning the platform and building out our processes. We are at a point now where we have embarrassed Aha! and will be promoting this throughout our organization.

One of the biggest hurdles is understanding all of the options you have at your fingertips. The learning curve was a little difficult at first to make sure you were using the correct area of the platform. For example, there are multiple road map options. Finding which one fits best for your need was something we had to learn by trial and error.

We were attempting to solve the ideation portion of our software development life cycle. We had tools for developers and testers but nothing for the product owner and contributors. We knew we needed a way to track the ideas of our contributors in an orderly fashion as to not overwhelm the product owner. With Aha!, we are able to keep all the ideas in a central location and allow the product owner to manage and provide feedback.

Aha! provides a complete set of tools to manage the full cycle of Product Management and Marketing.

I started using product development tools like Jira, and then VersionOne but each felt and operated as if they were developed for on purpose and evolved into product management tools. None handled product marketing.

From the moment a fellow CTO introduced me to Aha!, it became very clear that this tool was designed from scratch to handle the full spectrum of product management. The governance features that help the product owners focus on the business strategy and goals, help define product initiatives to deliver on those goals. Customer Personas help the product team remain focused on the customer.

Our product owners love working with feature development since they define both how the features should work, and they also get to prioritize feature delivery. The customizable Aha! Score helps align value with cost to develop.

For development, we integrate to Azure DevOps so the developers can focus on their development tasks while maintaining visibility into who we are building the features for and what business goals we are seeking to support.

Ideas are well handled since contributors feel welcome to ask for features and the evaluation process provides transparency into the promotion (or not) from idea to feature.

Product roadmaps provide information that executive management and board expect, in a usable format.

The tool is incredibly powerful with many features that make easy to create a complex monster that consumes all your time, so you loose focus on the original goal - efficiently deliver a product that meets customer expectations and business goals.

It requires discipline to keep the model simple.

This is not a traditional project management tool.

If you are responsible for creating products for a target market and are spending scarce cash on building the features needed to satisfy the market, this tool will help you make wise decisions and keep stake holders informed.

All of the stakeholders in the company are aligned on product functionality and release cadence which minimizes surprises. We deliver better software because of feature prioritization.

The product looks promising. Most questions I've had so far were met with substantial answers and recommendations. It seems like "sky's the limit" applies with Aha! and their support team backing it up.

UI can be busy, but this is always something that overwhelms people at first and once you get used to it things become familiar and you know where to look for the data you need.

Also, I'm using the Jira integration and there's a big learning curve here to get things situated properly with a complex Jira setup (multiple projects with various workflows, etc.) However, Mike in support has been absolutely fantastic at answering all the questions I've had so far (and there have been a LOT). Every other product I've explored for certain purposes (some similar to Aha!) didn't have answers or recommendations for the things I was trying to accomplish. Aha! is the first tool that appears to do what I need, and even if what I need is complex they have a support team eager to help guide me through it. I might find some obstacles/blockers down the road as I'm new to Aha! however I feel confident their team wants to help empower me to be successful.

Lastly, I first started the integration by mapping Jira Epics to Aha! Initiatives, which seems like the default out of the box recommendation. However I learned that mapping it to Master Features is the best way to approach it, and Master Features is not enabled by default. For learning purposes to get familiar with apps, I typically like to leave things configured by default until I encounter a need to modify settings. So, I had to redo my entire integration because it was configured by default which is not the recommended way of setting things up. This was the biggest pain for me so far. If you know this going in, then you're golden.

Have an understanding of how you want your records structured in Aha!, and if you have an integration to set up ensure you map correctly. For example, mapping Jira Epics to Aha! Initiatives is very limiting (default), but mapping Jira Epics to Aha! Master Features is really awesome (must be manually enabled and is not default).

Product Strategy platform to take things up a higher level than Jira. Jira is very tactical at a granular level of each ticket/record, and Aha! allows me to view/visualize things at different layers -- a layer cake approach. Furthermore, I've wanted to build an algorithm in Jira custom fields to consider lots of data points and automagically determine the value of prioritizing a ticket (impact vs cost). Aha! Score feature looks like a simple way to achieve this in Aha and I can perhaps link it to Jira ticket fields to get that knocked out.

Another thing that's big for us is to be able to represent plans, strategy, progress, etc. at various levels to various stakeholders. For our products, and the entire portfolio of products. Standardizing on 1 tool to empower this, and getting everyone speaking the same language and looking at similar data structures/visualizations really helps streamline this.

Aha gives us the easiest way to understand what features are in what release but most importantly help us objectively quantify which features are going to get the most bang for buck.

I love the ideas section which has let us open up to our customers and get them involved in our product roadmap, and importantly keep them informed of how their contributions are making a difference.

My favourite feature would have to be the configurable Aha Score. This has been the best way of solving arguments over which feature belongs in the next release.

The integration with JIRA is great even if it does take a few goes to get it working exactly the way you want it too.

It's a little daunting at first. This product just does so much!!! I do wish there were a really good simple dummy's guide to getting the most common things up and running including integration with JIRA. However, once I finally got my head around it, it has become second nature.

Definitely attend one of the webinars to learn some of the features. Just start with one product and get everything working as you want it before adding in other products.

Keeping track of the features and ideas for multiple products in our company. We are delivering better thought out software because of Aha that puts the most valuable ideas front and centre in our development roadmap.

It brings the point of view of the project applied to the final client at the same time that also shows the management that must be carried out of the team and the tasks that will be carried out to achieve the objectives. This double approach provides a much broader vision of the projects.

The timeline report helps us to check and deepen all the characteristics of our product, the deadlines we have to design it and launch it to the market and also the objectives we intend to achieve once we have presented it in the market. These personalized reports convey a large amount of information for the creation of new products.

You need to review introductions and videos to really understand the full operation of the platform since the learning can be somewhat long to have different features.

The user interface could also be a bit better structured so that it would not be so difficult to understand at first, although when you have been using the program for a while and that difficulty is reduced.

With Aha! You can structure and do a better follow-up of your projects and at the same time verify the final customer's vision of the product, so it is a good way to better manage the projects in the company.

We can design and structure new products better before putting them on the market. It is more efficient to have an analysis of the timeline, characteristics and objectives that we want to achieve, since this helps us to have a greater long-term profitability.

The operation of our company equipment has also improved, since Aha! facilitates cooperation and also to check the point of view of the end customer also helps us to better understand their needs and work to achieve them.

The Aha! portal is a good tool for product managers. It has a lot of features, some very deep. It is possible to use it to manage everything or use only the most basic features. The 2 best parts are the constant evolution of the product and the customer service. There are update and new feature on (at least) a monthly basis and any email to customer support is answered in the same day, sometimes the same hour.

I used JIRA for several years and I loved the keyboard shortcuts. Aha! does not have shortcuts, I would love to have shortcuts.

We have a very creative and engaged workforce and customer base. They suggest ideas at a staggering pace. Aha! helps us stay on top of this deep idea pool. With its integration with VSTS, Aha! also helps us keep the developers in their tool suite and the rest of the company uses Aha! to stay informed of the status of the ideas submitted through Aha!.

With the use of Aha!, we have been able to become better organized and transparent with the projects in development with the rest of the company. We are able to easily integrate with Jira and Zendesk which also helps us stay in sync with multiple departments across the company as well.

We implemented a user idea portal with Aha! and we've seen an increased growth in the communication of ideas from our users. It's wonderful to be able to promote an idea to a feature as we choose which ideas to incorporate, and then share that feature with Jira for our developers.

At this time, we do not have any dislikes as the features we use in Aha! have met our needs.

Try it! Aha! provides a 30 day, all access trial. It was through this trial that we were able to see what our team was missing and how Aha! could easily solve the problems and areas we needed to improve.

Before using Aha!, we manually created roadmaps in a spreadsheet application and struggled to continue to keep these up-to-date and in sync with actual development work. Aha! has a great Reports section that allows us to display the features, epics, initiatives, and more, in a report and have it automatically update as the work progresses. These reports can then easily be shared with members of the company, which helps our department be more transparent in our efforts, goals, and timelines.

As an admin, I appreciate the ease & flexibility in customizing the UI + the incredible support & concierge team who is always available to provide guidance. My Product teams favorite part is the ability to have a top-down view of their work, either within the Initiative, the Release, or from the Hierarchy Report - for planning & management.

There is some standard functionality our teams are used to utilizing in JIRA or other systems that aren't currently available in Aha!. However, Aha! leverages an Idea Portal and will consider customer-submitted Ideas for their Roadmap. It's also unfortunate that functionality like Custom Tables, is only available to E+ customers.

Because Aha! is so feature-rich, it can have a bit of a learning-curve. Ensure you're confident in your PDLC and other processes before building out the tool and then give your teams the time to learn & adapt. Aha! also has one of the strongest support teams I've seen to help you along the way!

We experienced a lot of gaps while solely using JIRA as our Product Management tool. Aha! provided an automatic Feedback Loop via the Idea Portal, a natural structure for Epics > Features > Stories (via custom naming), built-in Goal Structure, out-of-the-box integrations with our CRM & Development tools, one-click Roadmap Reporting, and - most importantly - dedicated focus on Strategy.

Aha gives us one place to store our decisions related to a product as well as track UAT and Support needs throughout the product lifecycle - But more importantly, the filtering, reporting, and search functionality make it easier for our team to find the context and resources we need. By having the additional work we do in development sync up via Jira with aha, we are able to provide better reporting on scope changes. I've only just started applying goals and initiatives to product lines and products, but I am already seeing that it will be a valuable tool for our clients in prioritizing what is valuable to their organization.

We are still in the initial stages of training our team, and so far the challenge has been assisting those users in seeing the right views, etc. It would be wonderful if we could assign default views to the team/individuals that they could then change if they wanted for their initial workspace. Some of our staff is less technically inclined than others, and navigation and filtering have been the biggest hiccups in training.

Like with any product like aha or jira, you'll find more of your setup is about defining your business process and less about the software itself. Start small and work up to using more features in aha to avoid being locked at a standstill due to process changes.

We use aha for a long term client, our internal custom software division clients, and our own product. Whenever I have presented aha to the stakeholders who would benefit the greatest, it has been our product owners and product managers, who have been the most excited. We've been looking for a way to bridge the gap between our technical and business teams, and aha has given us a place to do so while still catering to the many layers of stakeholders we have. The notebooks have been valuable for our custom service side when presenting scope to clients, as well as for C-Level reporting in the other business units. The idea portal has allowed us to create discovery groups that can input their ideas and suggestions, while still allowing us to decide final scope. It's been a wonderful way to increase collaboration and reduce miscommunication between stakeholder groups. It's increased the activity and engagement of stakeholders that were typically silent with our past discovery and product management strategies.

The feature set of Aha is extremely comprehensive, and they constantly add new actually useful features. It does the majority of what I need, and the data models and hierarchy are extremely flexible, with custom fields and workflows enabling me to build out an entire product and portfolio management process.

There are a variety of things that are very hard to do with Aha - they can be done but it takes a LOT of clicks. This discourages use of the product. A thorough UX review and redesign could probably drive up usage and utility quite a bit.

Aha probably does what you need for product management. It is so feature rich that it can be somewhat challenging to use, particularly for new users or people outside the PM org not using it every day. But, it is incredibly flexible. I built an entire company collaborative culture around using it. There are some things it doesn't do, like integrate with CRM to get lists of customers etc. The Ideas Portal is great, very flexible way to gather input from other areas of the company, field reps, support agents etc. The Jira integration is very flexible and you can probably make what you need to work work, however the hierarchy is complex.

Managing a complex platform product with many components. Portfolio management. Managing work for 7 engineering teams. Project management reporting cross-functionally. Answering questions of "when" and "what" for teams and other business functions.

Aha has developed a suite of incredible tools that allow product managers and product owners to execute on strategy at every level. The broad overview is handled well by initiatives, goals, and releases. The day-to-day works great in tasks, features, and the like. Overall, there is a great balance of high level and low level prioritization of information.

The only thing I dislike about Aha is the UI design. They really need to hire 1 or 2 UI focused designers who have done work on less technical apps so they can bring a fresh look. I know many of Aha’s customers are enterprise, but unfortunately the app looks enterprise in a bad way - ugly and a bit clunky.

Take time to think through your implementation and talk with one of their experts to get a good grasp on how Aha can shape and organize your teams work and ideas.

We are outlining our release schedule and cascading that information down to the feature and to-do level. We are also placing information about our company and products at a high level in the top bins where everyone in the company can see them.

In our company we have a lot of teams that work together on initiatives. Al the features should be planned and because of AHA we can make this visual very easy. You can add all sorts of custom fields and report back on them. We work in a government environment so reporting on all different sorts of work is very important. For the first team the product managers (SAFe) feel in control and teams are able to pull good features to develop. It’s also easy to connect AHA to the Jira boards of the teams.

Missing userstories an scrum board for teams, but then it's more than a product manager tool.

Use it to maken roadmapping and planning easy

Complicity within the planning for all the different stakeholders and business owners.

Aha! is the best all-in-one tool I know to formalize a business idea and create a product development roadmap. Templates and reports help team to get focus on development and help a lot in collaboration with stakeholders. In addition, Aha! provides nice tools to design product features from both business and technical perspective. I highly recommend to test Aha!.

Nothing worth to mention comes mind. Naturally one must learn how to use tool and it might take some time, but Aha! gives feature walkthrough and guidelines.

We started to develop a new SaaS service and wanted to formalize our goals, business landscape, product features and roadmap. Aha! gives tools and templates to formalize these in a way we want.

Besides having an excellent customer service experience, the Aha! tool meets our corporate objectives, our PLM team's needs, and connects adjacent tools to paint a complete picture of product development and enhancement. The many features of the application allow us to appropriately prioritize and access critical information from feature request development, financial planning, and service request resolution all in one tool.

Thus far, the only complaint received from the team is the inability to reply to all when communicating with the service team. However, we hear this issue is on deck to be resolved shortly.

Connecting feature requests in Salesforce, workflow in JIRA, and service requests in another application has been a hurdle to overcome, especially as our organization and product offerings continue to increase. When critical product status updates are needed, we lacked the resource to prioritize and track development. The Aha! application is the missing link we desperately needed.

The provided templates provide several services to users depending on their seniority and role. For junior folks, they templets are checklists of what needs doing. They are also useful to senior users as a handy tool when looking for holes. Senior users will find that the templates provide ready-made 'cubby-holes' for information that, without any rhyme or reason, just pops-up.

The ability to generate your own reports formats makes keeping other interested parties informed without giving them a monster tome what fur them is a waste of time.

Remembering that the team Is improving and extending the product at a blistering pace, what is missing today may well be a feature in the next update. Or the one after that:

There are missing features that preclude Earned Value analysis. If you are doing work with large government organizations (NASA, DoD, DoE, etc.) and on big projects, you must use a more traditional planning tool e,g, MS Project., you MUST do Earned Value analysis.

As an aside, EV has a bad reputation in some circles, Some of it earned, like measuring delays in Dollars ONLY. ("Hi, I am going to be about $50.00 late.") It is also used as a hammer to pound on project managers. In fact, it exposes where your plan and performance do not align, PERIOD! Then you go hunting fur the problem. Used properly, it is a smart thing to do.

Use the trial. Persevere and at least get familiar with the UI. If you need some of the stuff in MS Project (and /or friends), find a Uber-Geek to build you a bridge between the tools..

I am just getting started and already I am a fan. the interface must be learned, as always. Actually, I am a BIG fan!

Aha! This is a very full-featured road tool with a lot of multifunctional capabilities. Just to realize, what else needs to be done, and I can prioritize. In addition, I can see what my team members need to do, which simplifies the transition and support. In general, it is productive.

This service does not need absolute functionality, but the numerous functions of Aha! must be easily accessible in mobile devices, including messages, ideas and functions. In some areas, I would like the document to be done in a different way, but this is insignificant.

You can not doubt the productivity of this platform. So you will have an excellent strategy in the work. And also the opportunity to use a huge space for storing information.

We apply Aha! with the goal of researching the product roadmap, presenting ideas, tracking ideas and creating custom events. In this regard, we have a much greater exponent, in connection with which the wishes will be prioritized in comparison with others.

I have tried various platforms overt the last few years and love that it is the only one which has a strategy template and I can plan my activities based on the overarching strategy.

Then each element of the strategy can be planned separately and it becomes a very clear and actionable plan of action, which combines all part of the business together. Where HR/Marketing and business development come together. And all can see what is happening within the business.

It is convenient and easy to understand for all the team members, even if they are not part of the management team.

It takes some time to get used to it, but it is very intuitive.

its a great all-in-one system for all business functions

We didn't know which program to choose which would allow to combine all projects within the business in one system. And Aha! is well organise and intuitive plus gives a helicopter of the whole business planning/status of the projects. So we all can plan/track our projects be it marketing (anything from social media to website/landing pages/app development, off-line activities), HR or business development whilst still using one system.

Native integrations to third-party tools.This allows those that define the roadmap to use the tools that make it easy for them to define the work (AHA) and allows those that do the work to use tools that are easy to use for them (Azure DevOps). And, in the case that we encountered issues with those integrations, the customer service team was quick to respond, knowledgable, and provided great suggstions to get us to a resolution quickly & painlessly

It is difficult to reflect relative priortization that syncs from Aha to the third-party development tool. The AHA! Score helps with this but we end up having to define this within the third-party tool to help inform the development team of what's up next

Right now, our team is assessing Aha to use as a tool to help create a single source of truth for all work that is done by our Product team. We've traditionally used excel, powerpoint, a project management software, and a software dvelopment software; but we have found it difficult to manage work in many places and realized that none of these elevate the work we are doing to a leadership level for accurate read-outs. Aha, so far, seems to be the tool that will get us there!

AHA is well thought out, fully featured solution, and you can tell it's been built by people who are solving problems they have directly wrestled with in the past. The support team is extremely responsive, and the tool is highly configurable

This product covers so much ground that there is a significant learning curve and it can be a little hard to know where to start. The in app-training does a decent job of alleviating this, but at the end of the day, really versatile tools usually come with a learning curve, and AHA is no exception.

Make sure you are clear what your most urgent organizational needs are: Do you most need to clarify strategy? do you mostly need a roadmap? Do you need to improve your progress management? This product can do a lot of things, so you need to know what you are looking for.

AHA provides a single source of truth that connects our product strategy, market intelligence, and delivery roadmap together, so that we stay aligned as a product organization.

We really enjoy the visibility the portals provide to our clients. Allowing clients to submit, vote and comment on our current product solutions and view any outstanding defects has been a great benefit to both our staff and clients. Having this information helps us to prioritize our workload and create our product roadmaps.

Additionally, the support we receive from the staff is exceptional. They have always been very responsive and helpful with any questions we have had.

With all of the tools available it can sometimes be overwhelming when setting up the portals, workflows, etc. But once you have everything setup, its very easy to use.

Take advantage of the free trial. Once you start using it, you will be hooked!

Aha! has helped us prioritize our work based on client feedback regarding enhancements and functionality they would like to see added to our solutions.