Aha! Roadmaps | How to create a custom whiteboard template
Your Aha! account includes a large number of whiteboard templates for every stage of the product development lifecycle. From customer journey to sprint retrospectives, you never have to start with a blank page.
But pre-built templates cannot cover every use case. Your company might use industry-specific terminology when you create strategic models, or your team might work best with branded colors and a different workflow during brainstorming sessions. In this article, we will create a custom whiteboard template together, then add it to the template library so that everyone in our Aha! account can access it. Follow along and give it a try!
Do you have a large team? Our Aha! designers will help you create a custom whiteboard template at no cost. Reach out to our Customer Success team to get started.
Click on any of the following links to skip ahead:
Confirm user permissions
Action | User permissions |
Create a custom template | Aha! Roadmaps Owner or Aha! Knowledge add-on Contributor |
Create a new document from a template | Aha! Roadmaps Owner or Aha! Knowledge add-on Contributor |
Apply a template to an existing whiteboard | |
Collaborate on a whiteboard |
Identify the need
Before we start designing a new template, let's start with a goal. For this article, we will focus on a way to visualize all the features in a release. Our team has been playing some innovation games together to ensure that we are focusing on the most valuable features in our backlog, and we would like to move away from sticky notes so we can turn our findings into Aha! records immediately.
Our first task is to document what the whiteboard template needs to include. From a workspace in your Aha! account, navigate to Knowledge Documents.
Custom document templates created at the parent-line level can be used by any of the child workspaces. Navigate to Knowledge Documents at a parent line if you want multiple workspaces to have access to your template.
Click Add Use a template. We are going to use an existing template to help us gather design requirements for our custom template.
Select Brainstorming session.
Working with a team or by yourself, add a sticky for important design and functionality requirements. We want to be sure to consider:
Who at our company will use this template? Do we need to consider use cases beyond our own team?
How will this template benefit our company? We should prioritize designs that encourage these outcomes.
What are our company brand requirements? We might use branded colors or require certain terminology, and we can customize the template to match those requirements.
Vote on individual sticky notes, then drag them into Themes of requirements. In our case, it looks like we can group ideas into the themes of Brand, Use cases, and Business requirements.
In our company, custom templates need to go through an internal review process before they can be added to the template library. So off to the side of the Brainstorming session, let's document the review process.
Click Template from the whiteboard toolbar and select the Workflow diagram template.
Drag, edit, and adjust the workflow to fit your review process. In our case, we have three review cycles in a fairly straight line, as shown here. We have also added the expected turnaround time of each cycle, so we can estimate how soon we could expect to use our new template, if approved.
This is a great start. We are ready to incorporate this feedback in a design.
Create a mockup
Next, we will create a lightweight version of the template, so that we can experiment and adjust. Our team has recently been playing Prune the Product Tree as a way to gamify feature prioritization and visualize parts of our product that have disproportionate development focus.
For this game, we need to draw a tree to represent our product.
Branches on the tree represent our product's major areas of functionality.
Roots represent our product's supporting infrastructure.
Leaves represent potential new features, and our team adds them to the appropriate branch.
For a mockup of this innovation game, let's use basic workflow shapes and sticky notes. To do this from Knowledge Documents:
Click Add Whiteboard. This will create a blank whiteboard.
Create the tree's trunk. Click the Shape button (or use the shortcut
s) and select a rectangle. Drag it to the appropriate dimensions. If you like, color the outline a light brown.Create the branches. We can make these beautiful later; for now, create several more rectangles and place them above the tree trunk. If you like, change the height or width of the branches to represent the importance of each product area to your core product value.
Double-click on the trunk and each branch, and type to label them.
Connect the branches to the trunk. Click on the trunk, then click and drag a line to a branch. Repeat the process to each branch. If you need to move, rotate, or resize branches, they will remain connected to the trunk through these lines.
Repeat these steps to add roots to your tree. Make sure that the individual roots and branches are far enough from each other that there will be room for your team to add features to them.
Finally, use sticky notes for leaves, to represent individual features in our current release.
The result looks simple and functional. Perfect amount of effort for a workable mockup.
Try it out
We are ready for a trial. Let's invite the team.
Click the Share button in the upper right of the whiteboard.
Once everyone has arrived, we get to play the game!
Everyone should drag one leaf onto the appropr