December 25, 2013

Best Product Management Software: New Roadmap Views, Bulk Editing of Features, Jira Integration and More

by Brian de Haaff

Update: We recently launched our most powerful Jira integration ever. Learn more about it here.

We were in a giving mood yesterday and wanted to celebrate the holidays with a last minute gift for all of our great customers. So we boxed together a number of requests — big and small — and delivered a fresh batch of goodies that you will enjoy no matter what holiday you celebrate.

Ability to scroll portfolio roadmap and zoom in and out You can now control the timeframe that you are viewing on the home screen (dashboard) in Aha! This allows you to navigate back in time and into the future one quarter at a time by clicking the arrows. You can also zoom out to a two year view (eight quarters) by selecting the magnifying glass. And however you configure the screen, you can still publish it to a Notebook, and that view will be remembered and presented the next time you return to the home page as well.

Bulk editing of features Our second new feature in this release makes editing lots of features at the same time a snap. This is particularly useful if you use the CSV import tool to seed your account or simply need to edit a number of features at once. You can find this new functionality on the Features - List screen. Look for the checkboxes to the left of the features that you want to select. Note that you can add columns to the list by using the green control on the right and filter it be using the green control on the left. When you select the features that you want to update, an editing control will slide open to give you a number of bulk edit options.

Release slider now on Feature screens The Releases screen always provides a terrific way to visualize the releases or sprints that you have planned for a product. However, when you are viewing Features on either the Board or in the List view it’s useful to be able to click on a release and view the details and make edits on the same screen. This is now possible. Simple click on a release name on the Features screens and the details will be presented right there.

View feature names on Roadmap - Pivot tables We released the Roadmap Pivot table and folks really loved being able to create custom views of their data and share it with others via Notebooks. However, we received feedback that people also wanted to be able to select “feature names” and display them in cells in certain views. You now can achieve this by selecting Feature and placing it into the Cells field.

Better visibility of Strategic Initiatives Strategic Initiatives allow you to map the business value of releases and features. On the Strategic Initiatives screen you can now see the relationship of Strategic Initiatives to each other. Open any of your Initiatives and you will see a table of the Initiative’s parents and any children.

JIRA integration enhancements We also enhanced our JIRA integration in a number of ways based on your feedback. You can now do the following:

Select how Features and Requirements are sent to Jira (with the ability to choose Epic and Stories now).
Any comments that are added to the JIRA issue will also be automatically added to the Aha! item that the issue was created from.
Changes to the status, name or description of a JIRA issue will be reflected in the Aha! item the issue was created from. Any other changes will cause a comment to be added to the Aha! item describing the change.