Visualize Your Product Roadmap Strategy
September 15, 2016

Visualize Your Product Roadmap Strategy

by Brian de Haaff

Great products are typically the result of having a breakthrough plan. That’s a strategy. Aha! makes it easy to set your product vision, goals, and strategic initiatives and link them to your releases and features. We call this the “red thread of strategy” and believe that it’s fundamental to the roadmapping process. And now you can visualize, via an interactive diagram, your entire strategic business and product framework.

Your product strategy should relate to the overall company strategy and establish your vision, goals, and initiatives. In the past, this was nearly impossible to map out and keep up-to-date in Excel and Powerpoint and the bug system. We change all of that by helping you capture everything strategic that matters. With this Aha! release, you can automatically see the relationships between your product lines, products, goals, initiatives, and releases all on one screen.

The new Aha! product strategy diagram provide an unparalleled view of what your are planning to develop and why.

We suggest you think about strategy from the top with vision first. You want to be able to explain your view of the market and customers and how you see the future. That makes it easier to set goals, articulate the higher level initiatives that you need to achieve the goals, and then tie the initiatives to releases. Creating these relationships will tell the story of your product roadmap in an entirely new way.

Here what’s new in this Aha! release.

Linking Initiatives to Goals The first major aspect of this release is that it provides the ability to create linkages between goals and initiatives. In the past, they operated independently in Aha! and could be linked to releases and features as needed. You can still use them that way, but you now can also link initiatives to the goals that they serve.

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For example, you may have a goal of being #1 in mobile in your market and now you can link initiatives related to enhancing your iOS and Android apps directly to that objective. Link your initiatives to goals or goals to initiatives on the Goals and Initiatives screens.

Interactive Roadmap Strategy Diagram Under the Reports section in Aha! we have introduced a strategy visualization titled Diagram. This screen allows you to visualize your strategy in a way that was never before possible in a product management application. Each layer of the chart represents a different set of data — starting with your products at the core and working out to your releases at the edges.

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You can zoom in and out and even filter the screen by your products, goals, initiatives, and releases to get the exact view that you want.

Sharing Your Roadmap Strategy And when you are happy with a view that you have created and want to save it for yourself or the team, you can use the Save View button to remember it. In addition, you can add the view with the filters that you have applied to a Notebook. Create as many views and Notebooks as you need. You will also find a new Roadmap strategy diagram thumbnail on the Notebooks page.

A great roadmap starts with a clear product vision and a canvas that explains the customer and market forces that will shape the product’s direction. In Aha!, we call this plan a strategy and your strategy should be at the core of everything you do. That’s why it’s critical to be able to easily tie your strategy together and visualize the relationships. This new release makes that a joy to do.

All product and company names herein are trademarks of their respective owners.

Brian de Haaff

Brian de Haaff

Brian seeks business and wilderness adventure. He is the co-founder and CEO of Aha! — the world’s #1 product development software — and the author of the bestseller Lovability and The Startup Adventure newsletter. Brian writes and speaks about product and company growth and the journey of pursuing a meaningful life.

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