Aha!

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

Reasons for Switching to Aha!

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

Reasons for Switching to Aha!

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

Reasons for Switching to Aha!

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.