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Aha! Roadmaps | Analyze your competitors

For too many teams, competitive analysis is a casual process. Based on hunches and stored in outdated spreadsheets, it is no wonder that it is difficult for teams to verbalize their competitive advantage, much less use it to inform their strategic roadmaps.

Aha! Roadmaps allows you to easily track competitors and capture key information such as revenue, number of employees, and positioning. Once you have defined your competitors, you can then use the competitor chart view to create compelling visuals showing how your own products or services stack up against your competition. And as with almost any page in Aha! Roadmaps, you can share competitor profiles and your competitor chart in an Aha! Roadmaps presentation.

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Strategic competitors in Aha! Roadmaps

Create a competitor profile

To create a competitor profile, navigate to Strategy Competitors. If this is your first time on the page, you will be presented with the option to add a competitor. Clicking Add competitor will load the example competitor, called 360 Tracker.

To rearrange a list of existing competitors, hover over a competitor card and use the arrows icon to reorder it. This can be useful when prioritizing the highest-ranking competitors in your market landscape.

To edit a competitor profile, click anywhere on the competitor card to open the competitor drawer view. From this view, you can:

  • Enter a name, logo, and edit the content for each field on the Overview tab.

  • Collaborate on the competitor by assigning work in the To-dos tab.

  • Discuss the competitor in the Comments tab.

  • Use the More options menu to Add custom fields, Edit the competitor record type's custom field layout, or Copy, Move, or Delete an individual competitor.

All of the data objects on the main competitor card can easily be reorganized. Hover over any field and drag and drop to change where it is displayed on your card. You can also click the Hide field icon when hovering over a field to hide it from the card. Hiding a field will add a new Hidden fields dropdown that allows you to unhide hidden fields. Don't worry — hiding a field does not delete the information. It is only hidden.

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Upload a competitor logo

When editing the fields, don't forget to add a logo for your competitor's product or service. When you first upload a logo, the Image editor will appear and allow you to resize or reposition your competitor's logo for the competitor profile.

The ideal image file size for the image editor is square and at least 200 x 200 pixels. Supported file types include .png, .gif, .jpg, .jpeg, .jp2, .bmp, .tif, and .tiff.

Image editor for strategic competitors

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Apply competitors across your workspace hierarchy

We recommend that you create competitor profiles at the highest applicable level of your workspace hierarchy. If a competitor applies to multiple workspaces, those workspaces can inherit that competitor — and changes you make at the workspace line level will be reflected down the workspace hierarchy.

To add competitors at the workspace line level, select the appropriate line in your workspace hierarchy dropdown and go to Strategy Competitors. You will need owner or contributor access to the workspace line to add or edit competitors there.

While competitor profiles can be inherited down your workspace hierarchy, they can only be charted in the workspace line where they were created.

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Visualize your competition

Once you have completed your competitor profiles, you can visualize the competitive landscape by clicking the Change view type dropdown on the top-left corner of the page. From there, you can switch between the Details view, where you create competitor profiles, and the Chart view, where you can visualize and compare competitors to each other.

When you switch between the Details and Chart views, any filters you have applied will apply to your new view, so you never lose focus.

In the Chart view, click Show your workspaces on the left side to bring up a list of all of the workspaces you have defined in your Aha! Roadmaps account.

You can customize the titles for each of the quadrants on the matrix to align with how you organize competitors. If you defined your own competitor threat scorecard, you can set the scoring metrics as the horizontal and vertical axis and drag and drop competitors to adjust their scores. The chart options allow you to toggle the display of names and logos as well as reverse the horizontal and vertical scales.

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Create a competitor threat scorecard

Aha! scorecards allow you to prioritize records and rank your competitors. Navigate to Settings ⚙️ Workspace → Configure for any workspace or workspace line. Then select a Scorecard for competitors.

The default scorecard tracks four separate metrics, though you can edit the default scorecard to adjust the simple equation or create an advanced equation of your own. If you create your own scorecard, be sure to use a large point scale. We recommend at least 1–100. The matrix chart has an underlying grid system that allows the drag-and-drop functionality to alter scores. If your score range is too small, such as 1–10, there will essentially be a 10x10 grid that the competitors will snap to when dropped which causes less flexibility on where the competitors are displayed visually. A scale of 1–100 makes the grid a 100x100, which allows much more granular control over where the competitors are arranged visually.

You can also create your own scorecard in Settings ⚙️ Account Scorecards, and then add it to your competitor layout in Settings ⚙️ Account Custom layouts. Though you should note that selecting a different scorecard in your workspace will instantly erase all previously entered scores from competitors in that workspace.

Once you have selected a competitor scorecard, head back to Strategy Competitors. In the Chart view, click any competitor profile to see their score (and click the score itself to adjust it), or drag and drop a competitor around the chart to adjust their score on the two axes you have chosen. Click on an axis to select a different metric, and click any text on the chart to edit it.

Dragging a competitor around the Chart view will update the competitor's total score as well as the two metrics you have assigned to the two axes. If your scorecard has more than two metrics, those metrics will not be updated.

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Filter by scorecard metrics

In addition to the competitor Detail and the competitor Chart views, you can create a list report to further analyze your competition. To do this, navigate to Roadmaps List and click Create new report. Create a report with Competitor as your primary record type, then add columns in the Add fields step of the report builder.

For a basic comparative view, you can add Competitor name and Competitor score. But sometimes the competitor with the highest threat score is not the one you want to focus on. Your team might be focusing on competing products with the greatest breadth, or a team of executives might want to analyze your competitors based on their ability to execute. Maybe you want to look at any competitors with a range of values in a particular metric — such as a list of all competitors with scoring over 90 out of 100 in market awareness. In these cases, you should filter your list report by scorecard metric, not total score.

Note: This does not apply to scorecards that are in a custom field.

This report can get as sophisticated as you need it to. Click Customize view ⚙️ Edit data to add more data to your report, click Edit filters to add advanced filters, or hover over the filters bar at the top of the page and click the Add filter + icon to add basic filters.

You can add or filter for the metrics for any scorecard in use in your account. So it is helpful to know ahead of time which scorecard applies to competitors in your workspace.

To do this, navigate to Settings ⚙️ Workspace Configure Scorecard for competitors. If you see a custom scorecard there, note its name, then search for that scorecard in the Add filter + and Edit data modals — each scorecard metric will append the scorecard name. If you see the default scorecard there, search for the Aha! default competitor scorecard in the Add filter + and Edit data modals.

If filtering by these values, click the filter's dropdown and select from the numerical filter options to show values that are a range, a comparison, blank, or not blank. You can apply multiple filters at once — for example, you may want to filter for competitors with very low market awareness but greater-than-average product breadth.

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