11 Most Popular Aha! Software Features Launched in Q1 2023

A snapshot of new features launched in Aha! software in the first quarter.

April 4, 2023

11 Most Popular Aha! Software Features Launched in Q1 2023

by Claire George

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.

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.

Set a one-way integration with your dev tool to keep your rank in Aha! Roadmaps as the single source of truth. This prevents any changes made in integrated tools from impacting the Aha! field.

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.

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.