Aha! Reviews

Pros

It is made by Product Managers for Product Managers
It has features around the vision and strategy of the company
There is clear separation between ideas and features
There are Personas that can be attached to ideas and features
There are goals and strategies
There are areas to store your files
You can create shareable presentations that update dynamically
You can build wireframes within the tool
You can house everything you need as a Product Manager is one locations
The support is amazing
Integrates with JIRA

Cons

I find it difficult to find what I am looking for in the knowledge base
Some of the features are not very intuitive to use
There are a few features I would like to see added

Alternatives Considered

Targetprocess, Quip, ProductPlan, Craft.io, GoodDay, Confluence, monday.com, Wrike, Productboard and ProdPad

Reasons for Choosing Aha!

JIRA does not provide the features needed for a Product Management Team

Switched From

Jira

Reasons for Switching to Aha!

Because it was the only one that had all of the key features we were looking for.

Pros

I first used Aha! four or five years ago - and it was good then, but has come a long way.

I really like how Aha! brings together the why of product strategy with the how of product management. It enables our team to collaborate, stay informed, share, and stay on track in these areas in ways that are very difficult to do with JIRA alone, or some combination of product specifications and JIRA.

It's intuitive and the support is very responsive, knowledgeable and friendly. There is a lot of customization possible, although I have not dipped into that much yet. But it is clear that as the size and scope of our development organization and product line grow that Aha! has everything needed to manage, prioritize & focus our efforts.

Integration with Atlassian JIRA is also strong and a good option. We looked at only using Aha! - including for managing our development tickets & sprints - but that is not a fit at this point. Keeping the clutter & detail of all the workstream & ticket management for development separate is a better solution.

I definitely recommend Aha as best in class for product management.

Cons

The one major improvement that I see is the need for some type of Knowledge Base / Documentation tool set similar to Confluence. Write now, I find that I have to keep meeting notes in separate documents, as these will tend to cover multiple tickets, and have other work to assign tasks and so on. With Confluence + JIRA, you can both document meetings and develop specifications in one place, and then link this to all of the tickets that are related.

Alternatives Considered

Todoist, Jira, Confluence, Wrike and Twist

Reasons for Switching to Aha!

Better combination of features and focus on specific needs of software product management.

Pros

It is very visual, don't need a separate tool for workflows, folks can work on something together, love the whiteboards.

Cons

There is a huge learning curve, can get quite complex, whiteboards need more options like lucid charts, white boards don't maintain zoom level when you go back to it.

Pros

Tons of features giving you the ability to follow up on biggest to most minute details of projects which makes it very malleable to various needs.

Cons

The learning curve is steep compared to You track.
Schedules epics activities development tasks todos and several other features can be hard to distinguish and somewhat confusing.

Alternatives Considered

YouTrack

Reasons for Switching to Aha!

Leadership decided

Pros

We like the ability to standardise our product management processes and data model across teams that had historically operated in different ways. Integration with Jira makes it easy to reflect development work being done with limited manual intervention required. The support team is always great and prompt to respond to queries. Good communication on new/upcoming features, too.

Cons

Some small improvements could go a long way for us - prioritisation views for initiatives, clearer record rankings, more configurability of the nicer-looking roadmap views, and so on. Additional configurability in user licenses would also be really beneficial (i.e. adding advanced functionality for just a subset of users) as there are some add-ons that could add a lot of value to some users but aren't always needed by all.

Pros

- Easy to use and learn
- Excellent support team, knowledgeable and responsive (all former product managers!)
- Several templates to choose from, or create your own
- Well defined structure for strategy, vision, goals and initiatives - single source of truth for the Product team
- Easy to share content with stakeholders
- Highly configurable to our organizations terminology and product hierarchy

Cons

- The presentation capabilities are somewhat rudimentary (formatting, graphics)
- Limited ability to support the Jobs-to-be-Done methodology (there are ways, but it's a bit of a square peg in a round hole)
- Embedded tables aren't sortable so it's a bit like older versions of Confluence

Alternatives Considered

Jira, ProductPlan, Asana and Productboard

Reasons for Switching to Aha!

Aha is more comprehensive, going beyond the roadmap and the "what" we are building to having dedicated space and structure for the "why" and "who" that drives the strategy. It's really product strategy + product development all in one. We weren't looking for an engineering tool like JIRA - we have that. We needed a place for business case development and strategic planning, sharing of real-time roadmaps, and a single source of truth for all things related to product strategy. The other tools seemed like targeted solutions to parts of product management rather than the entire discipline.

Pros

The breadth and depth of its functionality. You can really tell this is a platform built BY product managers FOR product managers.

Cons

The ramp up time took a little longer than we would've liked but thats the nature of the beast when you are working with a tool this powerful. Once I, as the power user, got the hang of everything, I was able to hold a few lunch and learn sessions with the rest of the team to get them up to speed as well.

Alternatives Considered

Roadmunk and Asana

Reasons for Choosing Aha!

Not nearly enough power for what we require.

Switched From

Productboard

Reasons for Switching to Aha!

Better roadmap functionality, much bigger emphasis on planning and external facing capability to allow our customers to share their feedback on our roadmaps.

Pros

What I love most in Aha! that it is highly customizable to all of our needs, and incredibly easy to use. I also like the reporting capabilities, it has never been easier to me to create real time reports literally in minutes and not to worry about the correctness of the data. Third thing I would mention is the stellar customer support and the frequently released new and cool features of the software.

Cons

Only that the editor license is not available to more people within our team due financial circumstances but as I always say Aha! costs this amount for good and valid reasons.

Pros

There are so few tools that allow you to develop the strategic direction of a product alongside the aspects of delivery. Being able to add the strategic vision, goals and initiatives plus link those to the releases and roadmap is awesome! I also love how as the product management I can see all the work passed to my team in a release schedule view whilst also maintaining a Kanban view for my team's workflow management.

Stop messing around with Jira/Confluence, Monday or Trello and get on Aha!

Cons

The tool is so rich that it can take some getting used to but once you get stuck in then you really feel the benefit!

Pros

Very robust, yet flexible to my needs and presentation. Always accessible with the cloud-based format. Visual illustrations of roadmaps and timelines across many projects and programs conveys customisable key messages to all key stakeholders- Executives, managers, and team members, alike. Customer support is also awesome; I was able to engage in a 1:1 tutorial and answer all my queries at that time and readily afterwards.

Cons

A bit of a learning curve as to how to apply the software to fit my requirements and intentions. Customer support helped a lot to easily overcome that.

Alternatives Considered

Roadmunk and Visio

Switched From

Roadmunk and Visio

Reasons for Switching to Aha!

For the integration and features noted above.

Pros

Aha! provides a comprehensive set of tools to allow our teams to track work from an initial thought through to completion. Using Aha! we managed an extremely complex software implementation with multiple integrations and were able to track the work at varying levels of detail while always knowing status. Aha!'s My Work dashboard, assignment and commenting capabilities ensured our team members, with minimal effort, could readily identify their work, call out and address roadblocks and communicate progress. Team members who are more interested in doing the work than saying what work they did are converts to the value of Aha!, praising searchability, ease of use and a central repository for all the critical information.

Cons

Determining the workspace structure proved challenging for us and we are still trying to decide what's the right configuration. Still, there's really no wrong way to set it up and the flexibility and adaptability of the product will allow us to evolve our structure to meet our evolving organization's needs.

Alternatives Considered

Jira, ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus, Confluence and Wrike

Reasons for Choosing Aha!

limited capabilities, poor visualization, high touch for PM and minimal features for team members

Switched From

Smartsheet and Microsoft Excel

Reasons for Switching to Aha!

Usability and intuitive UI, tagging and commenting, and project management without a big lift for team members who just want to get work done.

Pros

Aha! allows you to tie higher level goals to initiatives that can dial down to the most granular level. We wanted the capability to pull reports for our C-level executives to see what we're working on and our previous project management system didn't have that as an option.

Cons

We also loved the workflow features, however there's a little snag in the way we need to visually see our activities and tasks so, unfortunately, right now they don't have the capability to have a true workflow (phases and milestones) tied in with our processes because they get buried in the top level schedule/project. Since we work in the marketing world, our processes are different than the product release projects. If we could have the phases and milestones as a part of the activities so that if we push back the project (schedule) date or postpone in the status field that it would push back all assigned dates accordingly - that would be ideal. Right now, we are managing manually...

The notifications are another issue. There's a LOT of notifications that come through my email on a daily basis. Even though I have it set to a daily and weekly digest on each workspace, I still receive too many emails for every task completed or created in projects that I follow. But I don't get an email when somebody comments on something, I have to go to my notifications for that.

The my work view is really robust as well. Once you get the hang of where you need to look, it's helpful. However, the naming convention of the records doesn't allow you to know right away which task is tied to a particular project, so we're trying to make sure that we title the tasks and activities accordingly - but that's tough to do manually for project templates with generic tasks.

Alternatives Considered

Asana

Reasons for Choosing Aha!

We needed transparency, a department wide overview of all projects and campaigns that we could easily share with the powers that be. There was little project management capabilities that truly helped the team move campaigns forward - so the robustness of Aha! takes care of that and so much more! Now we have a birds eye view of every detail of what we do.

Switched From

Basecamp

Reasons for Switching to Aha!

Because Aha! is even more robust. I used Asana in my marketing firm for years and loved it, but we are not a Google based company and it still had limited options that Aha! beats.

Pros

The roadmap functionality and features, ideas portal and the ability to create dynamic presentation are key features that have been critical to our product teams. I like that we can connect the strategy of our business, goals and mission at the function and feature level. The UI is easy and intuitive and connecting to Jira is a huge plus for our collaboration with solutions engineering teams.

Cons

SAFe methodology is not completely implemented - although we have found ways to engineer it to fit our organizational maturity in adoption of SAFe

Alternatives Considered

Product Management Dashboard for JIRA and Productboard

Reasons for Choosing Aha!

It did not provide useful tools for product management, strategy, ideas portal. It was hard to see the tracebility and provide senior level management reporting

Switched From

Jira

Reasons for Switching to Aha!

Customer support, ease of use and setup, great UI, ability to have cohesive view across all areas, strategy, product, development teams, marketing, etc.

Pros

Philosophically, the software gently pushes you to validate decisions that are key to product management - why are you building this, who is it for, how is it helping you achieve strategic and tactical goals? With that in mind, it sets up the team to be critical in their choices, extremely important in the current market. You're not forced to use these features, but it helps with both top-down alignment and bottom-up justifications for expenditure.

From a feature perspective, the JIRA and Confluence integration work well for our purposes, the cascading templates help us ensure consistency in communication with Engineering across the product lines, an the Ideas portal is a great addition for internal and external feedback.

Cons

Additional data types for the extensible entities would be nice - lists of custom entities for one.

Alternatives Considered

Jira, ProductPlan, Productboard and ProdPad

Reasons for Switching to Aha!

Functionality - the blend of features jives really well with how we view product management and product investment, which starts well before the first requirement is written. Incorporating this into a cohesive package at a reasonable price point, and providing rapid responses to queries was key.

Pros

I like how easy this product is to use and all the features it has to offer. It's easy to setup and configure to meet most of the needs of my team. We are operating within the Scrum Framework and this tool is being used by all Scrum teams in the Agile Release Train (ART). We have been pleased with the analytics functionality to report out how we're doing as an ART.

Cons

There isn't functionality specific to Scrum teams. It would be great to have a 'Sprint report' auto generated so that we can easily see what was done, what was not done during a Sprint, burndown report and other key metrics reported for our Sprint Reviews. Right now, we piece all of this together.

Pros

Easy to integrate with development software and link to that work to the strategic goals and initiatives to make sure we build the right things the right way, in the right order for the right reasons.
Achievements build and are tracked overtime to show the ROI quickly and easily.

Cons

The price per user prohibits it from becoming the main tool used by all staff. It requires project tracking to be done in the development tool to minimise project costs overall.

Pros

All-in-one tool - you don't have to toggle between multiple systems to work on a project. In one system you can project manage, review supporting materials and documentation, evaluate capacity, route work for review, and report out on the progress of a project.

Cons

We moved from JIRA to Aha! so it was like moving from a Prius to a Tesla. Lots of features, so you want to lean on support from Aha! during the implementation and onboarding phase.

Alternatives Considered

Trello and monday.com

Reasons for Choosing Aha!

Lack of features and functionality. Could not scale.

Switched From

Jira

Reasons for Switching to Aha!

features and functionality

Pros

Aha! offers a comprehensive range of strategies for managing the entire product management and marketing cycle. I began using product development tools like Jira and then VersionOne, but they both appeared and functioned as if they were developed on purpose and eventually evolved into product management tools. None of them were in charge of product marketing.

It was clear from the moment a fellow CTO introduced me to Aha! that this tool was explicitly designed to handle the full scope of product management. The governance features that assist product owners in focusing on the business plan and priorities also aid in the definition of product strategies to achieve those objectives. Customer personas assist the development team in remaining customer-centric.

Our product owners enjoy working with feature development because they get to decide both how the features should function and how feature delivery should be prioritised. The Aha! Score, which can be customised, helps to balance value with development costs.

Contributors are encouraged to request functionality, and the review process ensures that the promotion (or lack thereof) of a concept to a feature is transparent. Executive management and the board of directors expect product roadmaps to include information in an accessible format and Aha! has delivered efficiently so far.

Cons

The tool is extremely effective, with numerous features that make it simple to build a complex puzzle that occupies all of your time, causing you to lose track of the original goal: efficiently produce a product that meets consumer standards and business objectives.

Keeping the model easy necessitates discipline. 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.

Pros

As a product manager you get a lot of information daily from all kinds of sources - and none of the tools that R&D typically use support you in structuring that information. So, you end up with Excel sheets, One Note notebooks, word docs in Sharepoint folders - everything scattered out. When we introduced Aha! the immediate effect was that suddenly everything has a place: from vision to strategic goals to tactical user story specifications, wireframes etc. It's right where you need it when you need it.

Cons

Introducing Aha! requires a mindset change in the Product Management team - everybody needs to embrace it and actually start using it to make an impact. This has been, and still is, the biggest challenge we're facing. I do not recommend buying Aha! if you don't have an internal champion who will help standardizing the usage and train the other team mates.

Pros

The software makes Product Management possible at scale. What I love is the ability to gather all different feature and enhancmeent ideas from around my company easily through Aha's idea portals. All of our employees now know to drop any of their ideas into our portal so that the product team can actively manage them and push them into the product. Gone are the days of countless emails saying, "I wish the product did xyz..." or being stopped in the hallway to be told about a feature request. Our employees easily transfer ideas from our clients directly into our portals too. It's a lifesaver!

Cons

The product is great and I don't have any negatives to say! Takes a little while to think about how you want it implemented, but it's very flexible and can scale with your team.

Pros

Aha! is SaaS based Release management software that provides a very flexible and customizable process based engine which provides unsurpassed reporting and analytics of your releases and strategy. The product provides good integration with other devops tooling and non-licensed based portals for access by average non-seated users.

Cons

There is a need for strong SCRUM or process background and it will take some effort to setup the processes. This is not necessary a con but the tool requires a couple of weeks of effort to setup before adding users. Even then I suggest you add a project test the process and adjust.

Pros

I love that it's specifically built for product managers, instead of trying to force us into using project management software. I daily use the reports for monitoring progress, as well as for setting expectations within the company around our roadmap. I've used the integrations both with Jira and Azure DevOps, and both are very solid! The ideas portal is fabulous! Easy to configure, easy to use, and saves me hours of headaches trying to manage that.

Cons

Creating a brand new report from scratch is actually harder than you would think it should be. Though, if you want to create a report from a template, it's super easy. Also, the UI definitely feels a bit dated in places. When trying to convince my company to use Aha rather than Productboard, it was difficult for them to see past the "Sexier" UI in Productboard to understand that Aha had better & more features

Pros

There is so much here. It is made my product managers for product managers. And as product management has so many variations in practice, this tool is configurable to suit pretty much all practices, processes and workflows.

Cons

The ability to customize is initially overwhelming, and its difficult to make sure all things are considered before configuring for deployment. Theres simply too much to learn. There are also certain things like workspace prefixes that once set and used, cannot be changed. So don't make any mistakes when configuring!

Pros

Seamless features and hierarchies and flexibility across entities. Excellent integrations with JIRA and very appealing dashboards. We particularly use the worksheet feature that allows us to literally create complex queries and link things and view stats the way we want. But the roadmapping process, view by releases etc. is very powerful as we create the direction but also when the product owners take it to the PI planning sessions

Cons

Capacity planning needs more options as enterprise software planning is rarely as simple. But as i mentioned above, the worksheet feature allows us to create custom fields and tables to get around this. It is an area that we would love for them to enhance as their reports in that area are awesome.

Pros

I love the usability and configurability of Aha! The integration feature is amazing for keeping an eye on my JIRA projects and also keeping everything in sync. I love being able to quickly share reports at different grains of what we're working on and what's up next.

Cons

Some of the reports have fewer configuration options than I'd like. There are views and structures that I'd like to apply to different items (e.g. initiatives versus capabilities), but the options are fairly rigid in terms of visualizations.

Alternatives Considered

Jira Align and Rally

Switched From

Jira and Microsoft Excel