A snapshot of new features launched in Aha! software in the first quarter.
11 Most Popular Aha! Software Features Launched in Q1 2023
Editor's note: Aha! Notebooks (referenced here as Aha! Create) has been split into Aha! Knowledge and Aha! Whiteboards.
How do you build lovable products? Above all, it requires a willingness to go boldly. First you have to understand your customers deeply. You internalize their struggles and dig for meaningful insights about what they need to achieve their goals. You also have to be daring enough to tackle problems in brand new ways — all while rallying the team around ambitious plans that support the overall strategy.
Last quarter, we delivered new features across our suite of products to help you boldly deliver against your roadmap — as well as improve your everyday experience using our software.
We continued to push hard on helping product and engineering teams work seamlessly together. Updates to Aha! Roadmaps focused on helping you communicate feature priorities, manage changes that impact team capacity, and proactively spot delivery risks — so you can achieve together more smoothly. Over in Aha! Ideas, we enhanced existing feedback capabilities to give you more insights into what your customers want and need. We also added a new program board in Aha! Develop so SAFe® teams can effectively coordinate PI planning sessions.
Whiteboards — available in all Aha! products — keep getting better. We added a ton of new drawing capabilities and expanded our library of guided templates to spark your creativity. We also introduced exciting new ways to move effortlessly from early-stage ideation to structured planning (and back again) in Aha! Roadmaps. As a reminder, whiteboard functionality is also available in Aha! Create as a standalone product.
We also kicked off the first of many improvements to the overall Aha! user experience. A fresh new design for cards improves accessibility and readability — helping you quickly find what you are looking for and understand the details. And we renamed the "Info" tab to "Notebook" in Aha! Roadmaps to make it easier for you to access notes and whiteboards. Stay tuned for more to come.
Let's take a closer look at the top features launched in Q1 2023:
New in Aha! Roadmaps
Our latest updates keep your creativity humming and drive even closer collaboration between product and engineering teams as you go from ideation to delivery.
Move seamlessly from concept to actionable plan
Bring your best thinking into the product development process. Convert any text-based object on a whiteboard into an initiative, idea, epic, or feature. You can also pull work items from your features board, ideas prioritization and features prioritization pages, and list reports and move them around freely on a whiteboard.
Send your shareable whiteboard link to others so they can easily access it in their own Aha! Create account.
Share rankings from the prioritization view
Keep product and engineering teams aligned around the most important work. Now you can apply the rank from your prioritization view to a custom field. Map the numbered field to your development tool of choice to give engineering a quick view into the highest-priority work.
Account for team changes in capacity planning
Team capacity planning offers a new way to reflect the real-life dynamics of your team. You can now schedule changes — like adding or removing members, adjusting work availability, and updating velocity — to more accurately visualize workload on the capacity report. All changes will be factored into your capacity planning so that you can be confident you will deliver on time. Team capacity planning is included in the Enterprise+ plan.
Once a change is scheduled from the capacity report, account, or workspace settings, the report will show the team's historic, current, and future availability.
Spot delivery risks to stay on schedule
Set automatic alerts for delivery risks to catch issues before they derail your plans. Track planning-related risks — like when features or releases are due soon — in Aha! Roadmaps. And if you use Roadmaps and Develop together, you can surface development risks that arise during implementation. For example, see when work is missing an estimate, assignee, or sprint, or if items have stalled or have unresolved dependencies. Proactively resolve these risks for your best chance to deliver on time.
Enable the risks you want to track in workspace settings, then add the delivery risks field to your feature cards to identify issues at a glance.
New in Aha! Ideas
We made multiple improvements to ideas portals and polls to help you gather more feedback. Plus, we added a new customer revenue insight for better understanding the business impact of each idea.
Use different types of polls for customer research
Use new types of polls in addition to more channels for launching polls. Pair a number scale or star rating poll with an open-ended question to gain both quantitative and qualitative insights from your community. (Feedback polls are an Ideas Advanced feature.)
Analyze poll results to inform future product decisions — or get quick input on new functionality.
Give portal users the option to comment privately
Private commenting is now supported in Aha! Ideas portals — so you can keep the feedback flowing while ensuring customers feel confident sharing. You can now reply to comments in a threaded conversation, too. These options are available for all Aha! Roadmaps and Aha! Ideas customers.
See the total revenue from all organizations who voted for an idea
Automatically see the total revenue from all companies who voted for an idea. View and report on this field in Aha! Ideas Advanced alongside other insights — such as voting trends, organizations, and the opportunity amount associated with a specific idea. This additional context helps you make more informed prioritization decisions.
Start by adding the new revenue field to organizations via the Salesforce integration, Aha! API, CSV import, or manually.
New in Aha! Create
Over the past few months, we made a number of enhancements to help you craft early-stage plans in Aha! Create — so you can map out your thinking and gain alignment.
Showcase the timing of early-stage plans
Whiteboards are incredibly versatile — blank canvases for you to capture and explore thoughts. To help you visually organize and share content in a clear way, we added tables, timelines, and progress bars to our whiteboards in Q1. Help your team understand what you want to accomplish and when by adding these key details to your view.
Show a three-month, six-month, or year-long range with a timeline.
Get inspired with roadmap templates
Start building your roadmap in Aha! Create with six beautifully crafted whiteboard templates. From visualizing your product strategy to highlighting the timing of releases, epics, and features, these templates provide a quick and easy way to start planning. Customize each template to fit your needs and then share with teammates to align on the path forward.
Start your early-stage planning in whiteboards with one of our expertly crafted templates.
Make your whiteboards even more compelling
We also added a host of other enhancements to help you create beautiful whiteboards. From rectangular-shaped sticky notes to commenting via annotations and image cropping, these small but handy improvements provide new options to spark your creativity.
New enhancements in whiteboards help you articulate your thoughts and make quick edits.
New in Aha! Develop
We continued to build on our Q4 work to help large organizations coordinate agile development at scale. Last quarter we introduced a new program board to help facilitate program increment (PI) planning and track progress once the PI is underway.
Streamline PI planning
If your organization practices SAFe you know how important (and challenging) PI planning can be. There is so much to coordinate in a short period of time. Use the program board in Aha! Develop to allocate work across teams and sprints, visualize dependencies, and create a PI plan your team can achieve.
Product managers in Aha! Roadmaps automatically have access to team lines in Aha! Develop — so you can easily access the program board and track PI progress.
It is our privilege to launch new features that help you dare to deliver — empowering you to go boldly for your own customers and teams.
Keep an eye out for new functionality launching every week across our suite of products. Want to make sure you do not miss anything? Subscribe to our newsletter — we recap the latest product updates for you every month.
Start a free trial today
These new features are available to all Aha! customers. Our suite of product development tools works seamlessly together to help teams turn raw concepts into valuable new capabilities — for customers and the business. Set strategy, spark creativity, crowdsource ideas, prioritize features, share roadmaps, manage releases, and plan development. Sign up for a free 30-day trial or join a live demo to see why more than 700,000 product builders trust our software to build lovable products and be happy doing it.
Aha! is a trademark of Aha! Labs Inc. Scaled Agile Framework® and SAFe® are registered trademarks of Scaled Agile, Inc.
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