Aha! Reviews

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

The comprehensiveness of this software is incredible. It has almost everything you can possibly conceive of when building nearly any type of product or service. It helps you organize, plan, communicate, rate, rank, document, and create everything you need, except the actual software code (but you can just assign the stories to your dev team, and/or sync to another product). It also empowers you to have the conversations with stakeholders to figure out truly what's important (as opposed to the endless chorus of "it's all important"). I wish I would have known about this years ago.

Cons

The single largest missing feature is OKR support. There are goals and metrics, but not a structured way to do OKRs for products/teams. But there is also plenty of other software in the world that does it. We did struggle a bit with the integration with Jira, but that's largely because of Jira deficiencies.

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

Drag and Drop in the Workflow BoardDrag and Drop in Sprint Planning - easily move items to defer to later Sprint, move back into the backlog, etc.Easily move items from ideas to featuresIntegration with TeamSupport to quickly receive priority issues from customer support calls.

Cons

Because there are so many features I feel like I am not taking advantage of everything. I find myself creating 'workarounds' for things I need to do when there may be a better way. However, the support is awesome!!

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Alternatives Considered

monday.com

Reasons for Switching to 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

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

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

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

Everything works how you'd expect it to. It is EASY to use if you spend an hour or two looking at the help videos and basking in the glow of what an amazing product you're investing in. Trustworthy company, eat their own dog food, led by a guy who wrote a book called Lovability. For us, finally being able to visualise our ambitions, go beyond simple roadmapping pitfalls to an optimised value-driven world, integrated with project management tools. Perfect.

Cons

Onboarding through the help files isn't that great, as it's now a fairly large and complex product. However, the accompanying videos are short and perfectly poised to help. You should expect to commit people to this product to understand and train others. Once you've configured and set up it's a breeze and a joy.
I could have done with more help containing output from workshops and discussions, whereas currently you need to use a combination of Notes and description fields, or some sort of crossover with Ideas. It isn't very clear and that is surprising seeing as product managers use it. You'd have thought a clear workflow capturing initiative and feature level discussions would be normal.

Alternatives Considered

ProductPlan and Productboard

Reasons for Switching to Aha!

The others tend to focus on planning and prioritisation, whereas Aha has the reporting, strategic end of things is stronger, plus frankly Aha employs product managers to help you. You simply cannot compete with a support team of your peers.

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

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.

Cons

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.

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

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

Vast amount of functionality related to almost all aspects of project management. The scheduling tools to set up different timelines and dependencies on a project is the best I have seen in a single self-contained project management tool. Apart from basic time management and scheduling tools there are also a wide array of data analysis that can produce graphs, charts, and reports on project details recorded into Aha!, providing info previously unrecorded or not taken advantage of while using previous platforms. This allows you to see how much time you spend, your pain points, and areas of improvement for a single project or for the entire company as a whole.

Cons

As with any complicated software, the software has a steep learning curve and it is difficult to build new processes in a company for a program with this much coverage and that touches so many aspects of the company. Oftentimes when we began using the product for a certain purpose we found that it was often required to make adjustments in other areas of the company to effectively use the software. A good example would be our adjustment of protocols in the company with JIRA to effectively leverage functionality in Aha!. This often meant work required in those areas that was not initially foreseen. However, when was said and done - after on-boarding the product the benefit was a net increase in our ability to effectively manage projects.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Alternatives Considered

Jira and Airtable

Reasons for Switching to Aha!

All in one.

Pros

I particularly like how Aha! allows the PM to link the features/tasks the team are working on to the reasons why these features have been defined and prioritized over others. It gives a clear direction to the entire team.

I recently joined a startup company as a product manager and I felt daunted by the amount of features and tasks that were waiting to be developed in the backlog. The team was working in Agile mode, releasing features as soon as they were developed. It was extremely complicated to organize them around objectives and priorities and we had no visibility on when each of them would become available. Some members also felt that the team was sometimes working on features that should not be considered high priority.
Aha! solves these problems as it helped us organize the developments into theme-boxed releases (even if we actually put features in production as they are developed) and the master features improve clarity by grouping features into epics. Each of them are also now clearly graded in term of business value and effort and linked to overarching goals and initiatives in order to justify the priorities.

The dynamic reporting features are also a real time-saver.

Finally the hotline is amazing! I had a couple of exchanges with them and their reactivity and helpfulness was way above my expectations.

Cons

I have only used the software as a trial until now, so I haven't spent too much time in adapting it to our specific needs. Once we sign up for the paid version, I know that I will have to dedicate a few days to set it up to best fit our needs and customize a few of the options.
I am glad that their support team is so responsive. I am pretty sure I will need their help and I am looking forward to working with them and benefiting from their experience from other companies.

Pros

Tool allows you to easily and visually create product hierarchy

Integration with Jira is incredibly helpful

Support reps respond promptly and always have the answer (even if it is "that's not possible")

It's improved massively in the last two years since I started using it

Easy to customize fields/issues

Cons

Some views meant to be easy to view are still ugly and not easy to change (pivot table / custom roadmap)

Occasionally Buggy - this comes with the territory of continually improving

The hierarchy can be restrictive, although I've noticed this has improved recently as well so hopeful it's eliminated as a problem in the future

Some features (capacity planning, dynamic forms, idea widgets) are only on the enterprise+ plan which is annoying considering how basic they are to the function of Aha

Pros

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!

Cons

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!

Pros

AHA! is a perfect tool for product roadmapping from ideas to shipped releases.

Cons

There are quite a lot of features in AHA! that are too overwhelming to use

Alternatives Considered

Productboard

Reasons for Switching to Aha!

The ideas portal and extra possibilities

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

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.

Cons

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.