Aha! Erfahrungen

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Todoist, Jira, Confluence, Wrike und Twist

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Aha!

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

Vorteile

Aha! solves nearly every need we have for product management. It easily integrates with systems we've found difficult to connect in the past and it provides a straightforward, easy-to-use interface for stakeholders to provide Ideas and Requirements. One or both of these have been a major struggle for other applications we've tested. On top of this, Aha! provides a structure to our product management and future roadmap that we've not had in the past. This is important as a single user may work across multiple workspaces managing a multitude of products.

Nachteile

If you are not familiar with the technical setup, there are some complexities to work through, especially if integrating with other systems. However, once done correctly, these integrations work flawlessly. Also, if you are new to agile product management or you've never worked in a rigid product roadmap structure in the past, there is a learning curve. With this said, once learned, it will make you a better product manager while making you far more productive.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Lucidchart und Smartsheet

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Aha!

They solved for nearly all of our use cases and provided an experience and product that will allow use to grow over time.

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

YouTrack

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Aha!

Leadership decided

Vorteile

It is user friendly while being extremely robust as you get deeper into the functionality. So far I've found that almost everything is possible in Aha and sometimes just takes a little thought on how you want to achieve it that will fit your organization.

Nachteile

I can't say there is anything that I don't like about this software. We're in the middle tier package and anything I would mention here is included in the highest tier.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Jira und Airtable

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Aha!

All in one.

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

monday.com

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Aha!

I was used to Aha from my previous company, we found the functionality to be expansive, used accross tthe departments it was coordinated and allowed mixed methodologies in its monitoring and reporting in the products being eveloped. The product management function in the company I am now in is new. I wished to introduce the best in class product management tool, for transparency, acountability and reporting capability accross the company. we have offered many in house demo's and everyone is very impressed, especially as they now know how they can access the information they need to fulfill and support their departments too

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Jira, Trello und Asana

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Aha!

Aha! has well-thought-out capabilities that blend strategy and roadmap planning with powerful feature management. I don't believe there is another product out there that comes close in this regard. And in such a gorgeous, flexible, and easy-to-use interface.

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

Essentially the Product Management workflow is embedded in their tool. It integrates with most popular task management tools and code repositories etc.

Nachteile

Not sure why, but UI of Asana is a head and shoulder above Aha. I assume it will get a look and feel refresh at some point. The features and functionality are all there however.

Vorteile

Product is easy to use and customize to our specific needs. Support is downright amazing!

Nachteile

Still new...there are a few items I wish that it had, but overall I am very happy

Vorteile

As the only user of this software. It helps me build my company from business idea to completion. As I scale, Grow and hire full time staff, I am able to integrate this software with my other platforms.

Nachteile

I am still learning how to integrate IAM

Vorteile

I am a management consultant. I work with small to medium-size businesses. Often these engagements involve helping leaders get their arms around a complex set of long-range forecasts roadmaps, projects, initiatives, strategic goals, products, services, and more. Aha! brings clarity to my clients like no other tool I have used. There are other tools that do this or that but nothing is as easy to use and drives clarity for leadership in an organization.
I love the ability to create a live web page that shows changes and updates to the roadmaps and other documentation in real-time.
The time savings alone in not having to create a new slide deck for the executives is a sheer delight to my clients.

Nachteile

If you are looking for something to manage the details of your project, I would not use Aha! It just isn't made for that. I always set Aha! on top of a project or product management system; jira or smartsheet.
Getting your head wrapped around the hierarchy of Aha! can be a learning curve but once you get that down it makes sense and works great.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Jira

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Aha!

That's simple, Clarity. Aha! beats everyone hands down for creating clarity at an executive level.

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

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 in any product. When configuring customization and integrations in other products, I often find myself thinking "if only this were as easy as Aha". Same thing about reporting - it can be a bit complicated but I think they do a great job of making it as simple as possible even with a huge variety of options and massive flexibility.

Their support is also incredibly responsive and friendly, and their documentation is good. It's been really easy for me to teach myself the ins and outs of the product and get answers to my questions.

Nachteile

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.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

ProductPlan

Warum Aha! gewählt wurde

Because our development teams make heavy use of Azure DevOps Server, we had previously been trying to use that for our product & release planning as well. But Azure DevOps server didn't provide enough ways to track work across many projects and teams, the reporting was not flexible or user-friendly enough, the customization was a nightmare. At the end of the day, we needed a tool built for product managers, not engineers.

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Aha!

Aha was the only tool that offered the level of customization and hierarchy that we needed for a large and multi-faceted suite of products, and it also integrated well with our development tools. Most other tools we looked at seemed like they were made with small portfolios or startups in mind, not a fully fledged enterprise-grade product suite.

Vorteile

Aha! delivers on the promise to make product roadmapping easy however it offers more than just that. We have been using it as a common platform in product management for planning product roadmaps across the different groups and business units in our organization. While various other tools for managing product features and backlog were already in use integrating Aha! into them allows us to work on and provide an overall big-picture where planning and tracking strategic objectives is more easily done.

Among the most useful features for us are the idea portal and flexible reporting capabilities. The reporting features allow us to replace sharing information in powerpoints to sharing a real-time view of product roadmaps and projects. The idea portal has allowed us to create a handful of portals to capture both internal ideas as well as external ones to connect and collaborate with our customers on developing solutions to solve their problems.

In addition to that we have also used it as our main project management tool and recently in other functions to for example plan marketing campaigns.

Nachteile

While it does provide Single Sign-On and directory integration it lacks more flexible group management that would allow you to link permissions and access rights to Active Directory groups to manage via group membership which is typically needed in larger ogranizations and results in some amount of manual work for us in assigning and changing user permissions.

Vorteile

the flexibility/configurability is the best thing about Aha. It can be configured to match business processes and needs and does not force adherence to any particular process. The diverse needs across our entire business portfolio are supported.

Nachteile

understanding "the lay of the land" within the tool is always a little confusing for my new users. Some expect to have hand-holding type navigation, but that is not this tool. A few minutes to show them the basics usually gets them up and running.

Vorteile

As an IS project management team, we like Aha's ability to organize all project and portfolio information in one spot. The custom report section's timeline report is used frequently for all portfolio reviews, and it allows us to drill down to a product, release, feature with 3 clicks.
We also use the comments sections for meeting minutes and another task tracking. I would estimate we only use 50% of Aha's capabilities but are very happy with our purchase. I Also customer service is 5 star when I submit an email I get a response often within the hour.

Nachteile

There is a bit of a learning curve, but videos help. I think you need a senior resource that will take a couple weeks to sift through all the features and identify what's important for your implementation vs. nice to have. Since we are an IS PM team, we don't use strategy and ideas, we only use product, release, features & reports tabs. We have experimented with strategy and ideas features but have not had the time to fully explore.

There are a couple of items I have mentioned to customer service:
I would like the ability to store documents with the assurance I can recall if needed - currently, when I attach word docs I have to keep a backup in SharePoint based on advice from customer service.
I would like the calendar to exclude weekends as the default (or as an option) currently when I set up releases using my templates I have to go in and change start and end dates to workdays,

Vorteile

Aha! is a complete end-to-end product management solution that has the capability to organize features using simple-to-complex org hierarchies while simultaneously promoting product management best practices. There were many areas in which Aha! outshined other tools: application stability, overall performance & speed, ease of use, (just the right amount of) flexibility in feature organization, and out-of-the-box intuitive planning structures (eg feature organization, release planning, roadmaps, idea management), and it's full set of field integrations with JIRA. While many of these sound like fundamental requirements for any product tool, I found a majority of the 9 or so tools I trialed to be significantly lacking in these areas. Aha! is more expensive than some of the other popular product tools out there but the cost is easily justified by their larger feature set that'll save teams time and money, along with providing a stable and consistent user experience. Also, Aha! was also one of the very few tools that supported the capture of ideas directly from mobile phones and enabled users to easily attach mobile screenshots to an Idea or Feature card.

Nachteile

Since AHA is a very robust, flexible app that can scale with a business, there's an initial learning curve (as is the case with any software that provides this level of flexibility). The up front time investment is worth it because once the application is set up, it's very easy for the team to understand, navigate and use!

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Jira, ProductPlan, Craft.io, airfocus, monday.com, Asana und Productboard

Vorteile

C-Suite and Executive level Goals and Initiatives are linked all the way down to Features and Defects worked on by Engineering.
Live reports (can be used in Aha presentations) are a huge time saver.
A versatile tool that provides the Product Management team with lots of options for roadmap creation, program increment & release planning and tracking.
Support is amazing and very responsive.
Live updates to the software. Great to get new features without extra wait time.

Nachteile

Live updates to the software. Sometimes the updates are unexpected and break current behaviors internal processes with no warning. Takes days/weeks to adjust afterward.
Unclear on why certain features are changed. The response is frequently that user groups said it should work the new way. No clarity of how to access this pool of user groups to share opinions. If possible, both new and old options need to be allowed.
Where possible need to allow to turn certain features on/off at the global level.
Recently started to push out certain features (e.g. Automation) only to higher subscription tier levels. Software is expensive enough to have all features at all levels. More direct/hands-on support can be kept at higher levels.

Vorteile

Prioritizing work and managing the roadmaps are the most intuitive and foundational parts to Aha!. The Integrations to various development systems are also strong.

Nachteile

Additional integrations with UX-type solutions such as Figma are only available through the additional development product. Our current development product is so integrated into our development activities, that it'll be very hard to move to a new system to take advantage of these additional integrations. Direct product usage integration would also be immensely valuable to add to the software to track the performance and engagement of delivered work and monitor KPIs.

Vorteile

I like the flexibility of this software, you can get started by setting up all your top-level strategy info and work you way down, or just jump in by getting some of the tasks off your desk while adding in the high-level stuff to see results right away. Aha! talk you though their hierarchy in great detail, but there's loads of flexibility to customise it for what works for your business and it was easy to get this set up. Their Demo templates are also useful to give context to some of the features.

Nachteile

Aha! has been well thought out and it's highly adaptable for many different businesses, however this can appear daunting when you're first starting out since you feel you need to use every tool they have, but when you start dropping in some of your 'real' data you can see which features work, which you'll grow into and which you're unlikely to use.

Vorteile

I used Aha! in my previous job as a Product Manager. When I started my own company, Aha! was the obvious choice for me to use to build our short and long term roadmaps. Aha! guides you through roadmap creation starting from your strategy, vision and business environment. The way Aha! is set up makes you think through all critical aspects of your business like the competitive landscape, and take them into account in your roadmap planning. Going through the roadmap process in Aha! ensures that we stay focused on the right things that bring us the most value.

Aha! Customer Success Team is legendary. In my 20+ years of career I've never experienced anything like it. True professionals who know what they're doing. The team responds to issues within minutes. They resolve the issues within minutes. They want you to be successful, and provide you advice and best practices to get you there. This is how customers should be treated, and Aha! is an inspiration to us in that!

Nachteile

I love it all! Only downside is that now I get really annoyed when contacting someother companies' customer service and my questions and requests disappear into a black hole. Aha! has shown a new standard that other companies would benefit in trying to reach!

Vorteile

Comparing Aha! with other business software like Trello, Airtable, Jira, etc entirely misses the point. Aha! is about strategy. It's a serious tool for serious thinkers, not a lightweight, card metaphor.

It encourages you to think through what you want to accomplish and why, while enabling you to link the releases and features that make up your strategic roadmap to these measurable, strategic objectives.

Features can (and should!) be easily linked with tactical Jira User Story (and Subtask) and Task issues, which will then bi-directionally sync Feature/issue data between systems and automatically update completion percentage for at-a-glance executive status reporting.

I've tried a LOT of other products, including those solutions built on top of Jira. Save yourself the time, and check out Aha! It's the only product that actually helps me think through my strategy and links these models and timelines to tactics so that I can see progress against my objectives.

Nachteile

The state of Gantt charts can be a little confusing, e.g. "Click here for latest version" and/or enabled "Save" button, when I haven't made any changes.

Vorteile

Aha is a very user-friendly application that provides powerful functionality for a product manager. The ease it offers to collect feedback as ideas from stakeholders and move them forward into features and epics that get handed off to a development team is great. I also really like the ability to create multiple boards that I can use to organize my thoughts and prioritize the work.

Aha is also very easy to get started with because of the knowledge base and videos that exist.

When you do have a problem you can't work through the support team is great. Amazingly quick response, friendly and ready to help.

Nachteile

There used to be features that I was looking to have added, but Aha puts out frequent releases and has added everything I was looking for. They also make it easy to submit ideas for future enhancements through the Aha idea portal that they have set up for their own product.

Vorteile

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

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

Use, customisation and reporting tools are great. The integration options are powerful and simple to setup and configure.

Support are really quick at coming back to you and helpful.

The ideas portal is a great tool. Help documentation is very comprehensive.

Nachteile

A lot of features/pages, can be difficult to navigate for new users. Their billing team can be a bit keen at times.