Aha! Roadmaps | How to identify and prioritize high-value ideas

You depend on your customers' feedback to build the products that they love. And your ideas portal is full of great ideas to help you understand what your customers need. But how do you find the ideas that will bring the most value to both your customers and to your organization?

In this article, we will explain how to identify ideas that are popular and align with our strategic vision — so we can promote them to our product roadmap and deliver value right away. Follow along and give it a try!

Click any of the following links to skip ahead:

• Confirm user permissions

• Decide what kind of ideas you want to prioritize

• Filter ideas

• Rank ideas by product value score

• Add priority limits

• Promote the most valuable ideas to your product roadmap

Confirm user permissions

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Decide what kind of ideas you want to prioritize

Let's say we're on a product team and we have a clear product strategy for the next quarter. One of our biggest goals as a company is to improve notification functionality within our mobile app. We also want to regularly deliver improvements that customers are asking for so that they know we are listening to them. We capture ideas in a public ideas portal, where our customers select categories to submit their ideas.

Our ideas portal gets a lot of engagement, so we have a lot of product feedback to sort through. And we do not have a set process for identifying and prioritizing the most valuable ideas — so we are going to use the Prioritization page to filter for ideas that fit our strategy, determine which are the most valuable, and promote those ideas to our product roadmap.

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Filter ideas

First we will identify popular ideas that align with our strategic vision. Because we have chosen to add Categories to our ideas portal to manage submitted ideas, and one of our strategic goals specifically relates to one of those categories, we will filter ideas by category, status, and number of votes. Then we will score ideas to identify the ideas that are the most valuable. If you want to follow along in your Aha! Roadmaps account:

• Navigate to Ideas Prioritization.

• Click Create new report and confirm it is ok to clear the current list. If you were previously working on another prioritization view for ideas, click Save view before creating a new report so you can return to it later.

• Open the Filter Records menu.

• Filter by Idea status and select Needs review.

  Needs review is the status assigned by default to new ideas. If you have a custom workflow, this may be a different status in your account. Account administrators can customize workflows and statuses in account settings.

• Filter by Categories and select the category that best aligns with your strategy. We will select Notifications as it specifically relates to our quarterly goal to improve notifications. You do not have to add Categories to your ideas portal but they are useful. Categories and subcategories help you manage and organize submitted ideas.

• Filter by Number of votes and define the filter to include ideas with greater than 10 votes. This will help you find ideas that are popular with your customers.

• Move ideas to the right for prioritization.

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Rank ideas by product value score

Now that we have a filtered list of popular ideas that align with our strategic goals, we will identify the most valuable ideas. To do so, we want to consider how much each idea is worth. We will use the product value scorecard in Aha! Roadmaps to estimate the value of work. The product value scorecard's metrics cover aspects of work that most product teams need to consider, such as how many customers an idea will impact and how much effort it will require to implement. Product value scores help align teams on how to prioritize work as it moves through the product development lifecycle. Once you have scored an idea, it will carry through with the record as it is promoted.

The Prioritization view makes assigning scores to your ideas easy — we can score multiple ideas at once without leaving the Prioritization page. If you are following along:

• Click >> to expand the product value score metrics.

• Use the controls to adjust scores for your ideas. Click an idea to expand its drawer view to reference details that may impact scores.

• Sort ideas by Product value to rank ideas from most to least valuable.

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Add priority limits

We have a prioritized list of ideas. But that does not mean our team could tackle all of them. So let's add some priority limit lines to segment out our highest priorities.

• Hover between the 10th and 11th ideas and click the Plus (+) button to add a priority limit line.

• By default, our line is named Priority limit. Click the default name to rename it. Let's follow MoSCoW and name our first line Must have.

• Hover between the 20th and 21st ideas and click the Plus (+) button to add a second priority limit line. Let's call this one Should have.

We now have two sections in our prioritized list (and could add more). If we discuss the list with our team and want to change the list, we can drag the lines to different places, or drag individual ideas above or below the lines.

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Promote the most valuable ideas to your product roadmap

Now that we have insight into which ideas have the most potential value, we can make informed decisions about which ideas would be smart additions to our product roadmap. If you would like to follow along:

• Click an idea to open your top-ranking idea's drawer view.

• Select Promote Promote to feature.

  You can promote an idea to multiple record types based on your estimate of its scope. Then you can visualize those records on your strategic roadmap. You can also link to an idea from a record's Research tab, though those ideas will not automatically change their status.

• Select an existing release or add the idea to a workspace's parking lot to be further defined and prioritized before being implemented.

Now that we have promoted the idea to our product roadmap as a feature, we can get to work! Idea subscribers will receive an email notification informing them of the idea's new status. And when the new functionality is delivered, we can add an admin response to the idea thanking our customers for their feedback.

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