A snapshot of new Aha! launches in Q1 2022.
The Top 9 Aha! Launches in Q1 2022
What does "software differently" actually mean? You might have seen this phrase recently on the Aha! website or blog. I believe it is about reimagining your product development process so the entire team can work in unison to build lovable products. This is why our team at Aha! continues to launch new functionality every week — to help you achieve amazing things and be happy doing it.
Our suite of product development tools now provides everything you need to turn raw concepts into valuable new capabilities — so you can collaborate effectively and deliver the most value.
We were thrilled to introduce Aha! Create earlier this month. Our new digital notebook gives product builders a dedicated place to capture, refine, and bring concepts to life. Use text-based notes and online whiteboards to ideate in the format that you prefer and funnel creativity directly into the product development process. If you would like to try Aha! Create, you can apply to join the early access program that will begin shortly.
This quarter we also opened a new data center in Europe. We wanted to make it easy for customers in the EU to choose a regional data center. If you are a new customer, you can choose the EU data center when you sign up for a trial of any Aha! product. Existing customers with annual subscriptions may choose to migrate to the EU data center for a one-time fee. Please contact us at support@aha.io to learn more.
Of course we also kept the momentum going on enhancing our existing products — including custom portal pages in Aha! Ideas, better capacity planning in Aha! Roadmaps, and new agile reports in Aha! Develop.
Let's take a look back at the best new features launched over the past few months:
New in Aha! Ideas
We delivered two major capabilities to help you take idea management to the next level. Notes are perfect for documenting details — such as research plans and customer interview notes — in one place. And the ability to add custom pages to your ideas portal provides an exciting new way to share your product plans with customers.
Capture idea management information
All Aha! Ideas users now have access to our powerful notes functionality. This gives you a central place to collaborate on and share team documents. As part of this update, we added three new note templates to help you plan customer research, document your feedback review process, and communicate product updates in a consistent way. Of course, you can also create your own templates using rich formatting options such as tables, images, and call-out boxes.
Choose the customer research plan template to define your research methods and identify which customer segments to include.
Share plans via your ideas portal
Many of you were thrilled with the launch of custom portal pages. You love having the ability to display a roadmap, report, or note in your ideas portal — so you can proactively communicate roadmaps and announcements with your community. This functionality increases the value of using Ideas Advanced and Aha! Roadmaps together to tightly integrate customer feedback into your roadmapping process.
New in Aha! Roadmaps
This quarter we enhanced our powerful capacity planning functionality and improved how large teams manage information. We also streamlined the way Aha! Roadmaps and Aha! Develop work together — so you can quickly assign work to the right engineering team and track everything that is being worked on.
Set realistic delivery plans
We keep improving our sophisticated functionality for planning work capacity. You can now view the team's availability based on whether work is completed sequentially or in parallel on the capacity report. We also added the option to estimate capacity for teams in story points in addition to people, hours, or cost. These enhancements help you plan more accurately — so you can deliver against your plans with confidence.
Calculate capacity with simultaneous work streams — so planning reflects how your teams actually work.
Group related work details
Customers on our Enterprise+ plan can now add up to five custom tabs to record layouts. This enhancement is ideal for teams that use multiple custom fields to capture detailed information about product work — such as design details, financial metrics, or compliance regulations. Grouping related information in a custom tab makes it much easier for everyone to view and update.
Custom tabs will appear in the order specified in the custom layout builder.
Stay aligned with engineering
We delivered two updates to help you use Aha! Roadmaps and Aha! Develop together even more seamlessly. The ability to bulk assign epics, features, and requirements to the right engineering team helps you move work efficiently through your product development process. We also made it possible to include all of these record types in a single report — so you can get a complete view of everything engineering is working on and the status.
Use the "Epics, features, and requirements" record type to include mixed records from Aha! Roadmaps and Aha! Develop in the same view.
New in Aha! Develop
Our goal is to help you craft an agile approach that works for you. That is why we continue to deliver enhancements that help scrum and kanban teams work more efficiently — including new velocity and throughput reports. We also expanded our extensions library to help you connect Aha! Develop with other tools in your ecosystem.
Streamline sprint planning and review
A new velocity report provides insights into how much work your team is completing sprint-over-sprint. This helps you plan future sprints more accurately. We also made it possible to track progress on the burndown chart based on estimate or record count to match the way your team sets sprint capacity. And you can now close out sprints more efficiently by moving unfinished work items to the next sprint or returning them to the backlog with a single click.
Compare planned versus completed work per sprint with the velocity report.
Optimize your workflow
We launched a number of improvements specifically for kanban teams. You can now set work-in-progress (WIP) limits on the workflow board to improve team efficiency. We also added a new filter to control the time frame for viewing completed work so you can stay focused on the tasks that are most relevant. And the new throughput report shows how much work your team is completing week-over-week — so you can spot opportunities to improve your workflow.
View weekly performance across the entire team or filter by individual team members.
Connect your favorite tools
This quarter we added new extensions for design tools — including Abstract, Adobe XD, Figma, Invision, and Marvel. This makes it easy to access the latest design files for new functionality. We also made it easy to link user stories in Aha! Develop with the status of branches, pull requests, and builds in tools such as Azure Repos and CircleCI. Explore the rest of our open source extension library to find more ways to link Aha! Develop with the tools you rely on to write and build code.
The CircleCI extension shows the status of any branch associated with that user story along with the most recent build status.
We hope these updates inspire your product team to software differently and be happy doing it.
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