Aha! Launches New Idea Management Software

Innovation is spurred by a desire to help others. From developing new products and services to improving processes, there are endless opportunities for you to enable others to be their best. But truly understanding what people need is hard. You have to deeply engage and listen. It also requires that you internalize what they think and what they feel. You need empathy.

I am excited to announce Aha! Ideas — the best way to crowdsource feedback, engage a community, and develop customer empathy.

The new product builds on the exceptional success of our flagship product, Aha! Roadmaps. More than 5,000 enterprise companies and 400,000 users trust it to set strategy, capture feedback, and build visual roadmaps. Roadmaps also includes essential idea management capabilities. But we know that not everyone needs robust roadmapping capabilities. There are many organizations that just want to capture feedback.

Aha! Ideas helps teams of all types do exactly that. It is perfect for folks who are focused on jumpstarting internal innovation programs or driving employee engagement. You can seamlessly collect and prioritize ideas via a custom-branded portal. And there is new breakthrough functionality too — such as live empathy sessions and in-app community feedback.

Join me on November 11, 2020 for a live event to talk about the need for developing greater empathy.

You can register for the live event here. We will also reveal the first major demo of Aha! Ideas. There are two plan options — Ideas Essential and Ideas Advanced. Let's take a deeper look, starting with Ideas Essentials:

Create an ideas portal

Give customers, employees, and partners a central place to share feedback. Create as many portals as you need and invite unlimited portal users. You have options for access. Private requires users to log in to your ideas portal, while public allows anyone to submit and view ideas. You can customize nearly everything — from terminology to ideas forms and email communications. Upload a logo and choose a theme color to match your brand.

Streamline your review process

The ideas overview page is your hub for tracking and managing ideas. You can categorize ideas by theme, add tags, and document key details — such as financial projections. Comment on ideas to gain clarity about what your community wants. Then make a quick determination about whether an idea is duplicative, likely to be implemented, or should be a future consideration.

Prioritize the most impactful ideas

Track the popularity of ideas based on vote count. You can also score each idea based on impact and effort. Choose from a variety of reports to help you track trending ideas and determine which ones will move your business goals forward. As ideas move through your workflow, automatic notifications keep your community informed of status updates.

Some teams need more options for idea collection and developing empathy. Ideas Advanced includes these additional capabilities:

Expand how you collect feedback

Give your ideas portal a custom URL that aligns with your company's domain to ensure a consistent customer experience. Encourage your community to engage with the portal and share ideas in their language of choice. You can choose to make standard text available in English, Spanish, German, French, and Dutch. You can also enable proxy voting in private ideas portals so sales and support teams capture feedback and add votes on behalf of customers.

Conduct empathy sessions

Bring people together for a focused conversation. Define a specific topic for your empathy session — maybe an upcoming feature or new service. If there is a related idea in your portal, automatically invite users who voted or commented on it to your session. Then you can create a discussion guide to plan exactly what questions you want to ask during the live conversation. You can also launch polls in the chat to quantify your research. Reference insights from the transcript later to summarize important learnings.

Gather in-app community feedback

Discover what customers think of your product while they are actively using it. Embed a feedback widget in specific pages of your web application. You can add a widget to as many pages as you want and update the text prompt to reflect the functionality you want to discuss. The community-based approach gives users a way to interact directly with your team — as well as with each other. Quickly convert messages into ideas so you can prioritize future improvements.

Aha! Ideas is now available to teams everywhere. Your free 30-day trial starts on Ideas Advanced. Purchase any plan later —  Ideas Essentials costs $39/user/month and Ideas Advanced is $59/user/month. And each plan requires a minimum of three paid users. Go ahead and give it a try.

For idea management seamlessly integrated with roadmapping, continue to choose Aha! Roadmaps (which includes Ideas Essentials). And if you already use our roadmapping software, read this special release note to learn more about upgrading your plan to take advantage of the forward-thinking capabilities in Ideas Advanced.

Put your community at the center of every decision — so you can be confident you are prioritizing what will have the most impact.

I hope you will be able to join our upcoming interactive product event. I will be sharing my thoughts on how teams of all types can fundamentally change the way they understand the customers and users that they serve.

Sign up for a free trial — grow your empathy

Aha! Ideas is now available to teams everywhere. Sign up for a free 30-day trial. If you are an Aha! Roadmaps customer, email support@aha.io to try Ideas Advanced free in your account for 14 days.