Aha! Reviews

Having been on a long journey over the years with many different types of project/product management software solutions, none of them ever seemed to be "the one". Aha takes a different approach, and focuses on management of end-customer value that is aligned against the vision you have for your company and its products. It's the first work management platform I've used that took this holistic approach,...

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Aha is a sophisticated tool that's very flexible and configurable so it takes a little while to get fluent with everything it can do, and understand the best workflow patterns with it. That said, once you find your groove it gets much easier. The support team help with that though. Pricing is also in the premium end of the market, particularly for smaller companies, but then you do tend to get what you pay for.

Any organization that wants to be thoughtful, deliberate, and wants to link everything they build to the reason WHY they are building it should use this tool. It takes energy and effort to adopt, but the results are amazing. Every feature and release can be linked to a strategic element. In fact, what you are getting with AHA is not only a tool, but a best-practices thought model for product management (this can be challenging to implement but the rewards are high if you get through it. A key benefit is that once created, roadmaps and reports stay FRESH, meaning all changes to dates of features and releases are instantly reflected in your roadmaps and reports. No more updating Excel rows where cells are months!! Last but not least, their support is second-to-none!

While I really like AHA overall, the UI has many challenges. There are many inconsistencies (some places have a save, other autosave, some screens have a URL, others don't, some settings can be applied to everything at once, others have to be set manually one-by-one). Also for a single page app, it often struggles with refresh after edit more than it should in 2021.

Aha! is great for keeping a running backlog of features and defects to be seen across the organization and with external clients if desired. It makes voting on ideas easy and sharing those ideas out simple.

Aha! can sometimes be buggy when typing up a new idea, the admin portal is messy and hard to navigate. It is difficult to search for particular items in the portal from the back end. I wish there were more options to customize what fields people could and couldn't see.

The roadmapping, release planning and feature boards.

The price tag is deterring the organisation to adapt it fully.

Hi Michael, Thank you for your positive review! It is great to hear how Aha! is helping your organization achieve success. In regards to your comment on price, we offer a variety of plans to meet different organizational needs. Many customers find our Enterprise plan (https://www.aha.io/roadmaps/pricing) is great for balancing paid seats for folks who need to add and manage product data with unlimited seats for folks who just need to review and comment on data. But it is great to see your product and engineering teams staying in sync with the Jira integration. If you need any further help, please don't hesitate to send us a note (support@aha.io). Our Customer Success team are all former product managers and would love to answer any questions.

I like the flexibility to create and modify schedules and reports. I can create tasks for team members and Aha! sends them reminders (upcoming and past due). I manage business operations projects and this feature has been very helpful and has eliminated my having to chase down most tasks. I like the feature to create various reports with multiple slices of data/views for different purposes by just adding or removing filters vs. building something from scratch. Customer support is top notch. Someone always gets back to me within a couple of hours if not sooner whenever I reach out with questions or requesting help.

This software is complex, IMO not very intuitive and has a steep learning curve. There are tutorials that are very helpful and walk you through most everything you can think of, but it takes time to watch them and/or read. Once you get past the initial phase of learning the software and features you need, you will love it.

For my role as Head of Product Management: The strategic view of the product portfolio is all important for the company to see and for me to report. The functions I use most are the strategic and portfolio roadmaps, goals and linked initiatives. I absolutely love the dashboard function, especially for executive resporting. And now use the different workspaces for the different departments who are dependant on the product management scheduling, this is also an added bonus.

I really wish the functions would allow clarity for Strategic objectives, rather than goals and support the framing of dependant team and individual OKR's. I also find it difficult to delete releases and features on the Strategic level workspace. It would benefit the different types of users to have the functionalities that they need and navigate to it easily. From my role as head of to the associate product manager, we have different uses and feature requirements.

I loved so many things about Aha!, but probably the most important thing was my ability to manage and prioritize a LOT of my product's features that can also be tied to Epics, Storys, Initiatives, and Goals in a very slick and powerful interface.

The product becomes cost-prohibitive, especially for startups, if you wish to use the "Develop" side of the product as well as the "Roadmap" side. For some reason, you need to step up to an extremely expensive Enterprise version, which makes little sense as smaller companies would of course want to use sprint planning and many other critical lower-level engineering and development features. The trials only allow one or the other, not both (without a very confusing experience), which seems odd for the same reason.

Hi Greg, Thank you for your positive review! It is great to hear how Aha! is helping your organization achieve success. Good news on the trial front — you can enable a trial of Aha! Develop within your Aha! Roadmaps account to experience both tools together. If you are interested, please don't hesitate to send us a note at support@aha.io. Our Customer Success team are all former product managers and would love to answer any questions.

Aha! is very easy to use product management software we love to use following software: - Product Roadmap - Idea generation - Sprint planning - Epics, feature and requirement descriptions

I think as a tool it solves a lot of issues but I could be more interactive like miro.

Has all the features I need to conduct my daily Product Management work, and the tool's speed and performance makes it very easy to work with.

Pricing gets very expensive as it is paid per user. Should have an option of unlimited guest members (viewers) There are many features and functionalities. I believe the onboarding tutorials could be more detailed and show real daily examples of features usage.

Hi Jessica, Many thanks for your review. It is great to hear how Aha! is helping your organization achieve success. We offer a variety of plans to meet different organizational needs. Many customers find our Enterprise plan is great for balancing paid seats for folks who need to add and manage product data with unlimited seats for folks who just need to review and comment on data. If you are interested, please don't hesitate to send us a note at support@aha.io. Our Customer Success team are all former product managers and would love to answer any questions.

Simplicity and ease of use. We tested almost 4 other products and can safely say Aha! takes away the complexity and the confusion away for small product teams when building software, and yet retains the powerful features so that we can grow.

Cant think of anything extraordinary that may have had a negative impact. Really can't..

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.

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.

I always tell people that Aha! brings together the why and the how of a solution, giving the view into the overall strategy components of a solution, mixed with the back end development and ongoing progress. It captures everything our teams needs to collaborate, stay informed, share, and stay on track. It's easy to use and the support team is fantastically responsive, knowledgeable and friendly. As someone with little technical background, the platform and an ever-growing knowledge base made it easy to customize the experience to our unique needs.

Sometimes too many options can be a bad thing. Aha! will let you do basically anything you want, but sometimes having that ability makes it feel overwhelming. However, I'd hardly call that a con since 1) I'd rather have too many options than not enough, and 2) the support team and knowledge base help you through whatever scenario you're in.

Aha! has made a huge difference in our ability strategically plan our releases and align across multiple delivery teams. It's the only tool flexible enough to accommodate our broad and multifaceted product suite, and allows us to report on it all without requiring engineers to create reports for us. The customization and integration capabilities are better and more user-friendly than any I've seen...

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Our biggest barrier to getting more value out of Aha is the cost. We would love to bring our scrummasters and UX leaders into Aha in more than essentially just a read-only capacity, but the cost to do that is prohibitive. While the benefits of Aha are huge, so is the cost, so it's something we need to be constantly ready to justify to management. The navigation is also somewhat poor, and there are a handful of specific views that are hard to use, which is a point of confusion for many users. But that's not too bad since we can usually create the view we want via a report.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The product has great tools for defining your product strategy, vision, mission, and allows you to easily track ideas, features, and plan your releases effectively. It offers a great integration with development software such as Azure Devops or Jira to bridge the gap between product management and development. I've found the software easy to learn and intuitive as I never had formal training and was still able to figure out how to use it well.

I haven't experienced any feature that I've found troublesome or largely lacking in an essential capability as it is customizable in the right places. There are some features (i.e. polls) that I don't have access to with the current license that we have that I would like to try out so I can't say for sure if there are any gaps in such features.

Thanks for taking the time to write such a great review. It is great to hear how Aha! is helping your define strategy and connect product management and development. As always, if you ever need any help at all, our Customer Success team are all former product managers and would love to answer any questions you may have at support@aha.io — or even for a live demo of polls!

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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!

Hi, Thanks for taking the time to write such a great review. We know every organization is unique so it is great to hear how Aha! is able to fit your team's specific workflows. I am sorry to hear you found customizations to be overwhelming at first. You may be interested to read our support articles (https://www.aha.io/support/suite/suite/customizations) regarding how to customize Aha! to match your organization's workflow and terminology. If you ever need any help at all, our Customer Success team are all former product managers and would love to answer any questions you may have.

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

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.

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.

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.