Introduction to the Aha! suite of product development tools
Welcome to Aha! — the world's #1 product development software. Our suite of tools provides everything you need to set strategy, spark creativity, crowdsource ideas, prioritize features, share roadmaps, manage releases, and plan development. They help teams build lovable products and be happy doing it.
Here is an overview of our tools:
Aha! Roadmaps is a complete product management solution. Set your strategy, prioritize features, and share beautiful roadmaps with everyone.
Aha! Ideas is a comprehensive idea management solution. Crowdsource feedback, engage your community, and prioritize what drives revenue — all in one place.
Aha! Whiteboards is the visual space for product innovation. It provides features to help you define user flows, create mockups, and collaborate on roadmaps. It is both a standalone product and a tool that is tightly integrated with existing Aha! products.
Aha! Knowledge is an AI-powered product information hub that enables you to share all your documents in a central place. It is both a standalone product and a tool that is tightly integrated with existing Aha! products.
Aha! Develop is the agile tool for healthy software development teams. Connect technical work to the product roadmap, optimize workload, and streamline reporting. Plus, you can use extensions to import work, connect with your ecosystem of tools, and customize the UI.
Each Aha! product provides best-in-class functionality. When you use multiple products together, they form a seamlessly integrated environment. This empowers distributed teams to effectively collaborate and deliver the most value.
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Use Aha! products together
Aha! products are meant to be used together — so product teams can thrive across a multi-stage product development process.
Product development can be broken down into seven meta stages. This process loops, of course. What you built last month will inform your strategic choices. Ideas will feed into your plans. New business opportunities will drive your roadmap and determine what you will work on next.
Using a tightly integrated set of tools ensures that an idea can quickly become a feature, which can then flow through as requirements for developers. It also enables a value-based approach to product development, so you can track and measure the impact of what you build.
Value-based product development prioritizes the strategic benefit of work items at every stage of the product development lifecycle. Product teams balance the estimated effort to complete work against its expected customer value — so that they can build the most valuable functionality with the least amount of effort. Regular evaluation keeps everyone focused on the most important work, and aligned on why they are doing what they do.
Here is how Aha! products support each stage of the product development process:
Product development stage | Description |
Strategize | It all starts here. Use Aha! Roadmaps to define your strategic vision — how you are going to provide unique value for your company and your customers. Expand your foundation with business models and then define strategic work with goals and initiatives. |
Ideate | Customers love products built by people who understand their needs. Use Aha! Ideas to gather feedback and prioritize ideas. Product value scores make it simple to evaluate feedback against your strategy. From there, promote the best ideas directly to your roadmap. Use Aha! Whiteboards to ideate on raw concepts and tease out underlying insights. |
Plan | Once you have your strategy and ideas, you are ready to get to work. Use Aha! Roadmaps to create plans, define features, and estimate your team's capacity. Then share your plan through interactive reports, roadmaps, and presentations. |
Showcase | Create beautiful roadmap visualizations with Aha! Roadmaps. Align everyone around your strategy and communicate exactly what you plan to deliver and when by sharing your plans via an interactive presentation, dashboard, or custom page in your ideas portal. Use Aha! Knowledge to showcase your plans — in internal wikis or external knowledge bases. |
Build | Time to bring your ideas to life. Product teams in Aha! Roadmaps and engineering teams in Aha! Develop share work items but retain their own unique workflows and highly customizable environments. Product managers might add custom worksheets to a feature to analyze strategic opportunity, while engineering teams take advantage of a custom GitHub extension to link out to pull requests. The result? More progress, less confusion. |
Launch | The best teams build products customers love — and launch on schedule. Pair Aha! Roadmaps with Aha! Develop to sync work statuses between product and engineering teams and track cross-functional dependencies. When you bring your exciting new capabilities to market, status changes in Aha! Roadmaps will automatically update every interested idea subscriber in Aha! Ideas. |
Analyze | Each launch is a chance to uncover insights and new opportunities. Use the sophisticated reporting capabilities within Aha! Roadmaps to analyze each step in your product development journey. Then condense everything you have learned into beautiful dashboards, roadmaps, and presentations. |
With a unified product development platform, dynamic teams can quickly move through each stage of product development. When you enable multiple Aha! products in your account, you create a unified environment with a consistent user interface and the same underlying data. This approach provides the following benefits:
Seamless integration: No fields to map, no integration updates to approve — just shared data.
Unified data structure: Teams in different Aha! products always see the same information on records they share because the underlying data is truly the same.
Highly customizable: Customize almost every part of your account to match the way your team works — including branding, terminology, workflows, layouts, and more.
Team collaboration: Core functionality — such as collaborative text editing, comments, and to-dos — are the same across all Aha! products. This helps the broader product team work together to communicate updates and manage reviews.
Streamlined account management: User permission updates are set at the account level and can be applied per product and per role. This makes it easy to ensure that people have the right access to your product development information.
Use Aha! Ideas and Aha! Roadmaps together
Product teams need to engage their customer community. Your most engaged customers will have passionate ideas for ways your products can improve — your strategic vision can help you determine which feedback is truly innovative and which ideas might not fit with your plan. Aha! Roadmaps includes essential Aha! Ideas functionality, so product teams can:
Create multiple idea portals to gather feedback
Score ideas to prioritize requests
Customize each portal to match your brand
Promote ideas to your roadmap
Since the best ideas inspire work items, Aha! Roadmaps users can also promote ideas directly to their roadmaps. You can do this for everything from one-off features to full strategic initiatives. When an idea has been promoted, anyone subscribed to the idea stays in the loop with automatic updates — so product teams do not need to worry about reporting on progress.
Aha! Ideas has Advanced functionality not automatically included in Aha! Roadmaps. This creates further opportunities for product teams:
Dynamic idea submission forms that capture information relevant to each idea's category with personalized questions and conditional rules.
Live empathy sessions that provide a two-way conversation between product managers and interested users.
Feedback widgets that help you collect feedback right from your own application.
Organizations, contacts, and customer segments that provide advanced insights into customer demographics.
Integrations with Salesforce and Zendesk that connect your ideas portals to teams focused on customer feedback.
Custom ideas portal pages that create opportunities for you to share roadmaps, release notes, announcements, or anything else that helps show where your product is headed.
For a breakdown of Aha! Ideas functionality — and further details about how to use it with Aha! Roadmaps — compare the two Aha! products.
Use Aha! Roadmaps and Aha! Whiteboards together
All Aha! Roadmaps accounts include essential whiteboarding functionality. While you brainstorm, iterate, and commit, you can flow seamlessly between whiteboards and your roadmap — and back again. Add Aha! Whiteboards Advanced to bring advanced whiteboarding into your Aha! account:
From early concepts to realistic designs, use 25+ configurable wireframe components to bring product concepts to life and engage key design and development stakeholders.
Arrange your ideas on a whiteboard, then invite stakeholders to a voting session. Gather their feedback, tabulate their votes, and move forward with consensus.
Use a countdown timer to keep everyone focused during brainstorming and collaborative planning sessions.
Design your own custom whiteboards template and add it to the template library in your Aha! account, so contributors to your workspace have access to a pre-built visualization that covers your business needs. Add them to a workspace line and every child workspace will inherit them.
Add dedicated Aha! Whiteboards users, so that stakeholders have access to your whiteboards, but not your full product roadmap.
For a breakdown of Aha! Whiteboards functionality — and further details about how to use it with Aha! Roadmaps — compare the two Aha! products.
Use Aha! Roadmaps and Aha! Knowledge together
Go seamlessly from planning and building new functionality to documenting exactly how it works — in one central place. All Aha! Roadmaps accounts include essential documentation and whiteboarding functionality. Add Aha! Knowledge Advanced to bring advanced knowledge base management into your Aha! account
Build as many self-serve knowledge sites as you need to for different products and audiences. Configure the basics — such as title, theme color, and access — then share the link to your knowledge base with your community.
Control who can access your knowledge base. Make a site private by requiring a password or publish a public site so anyone can access your documentation.
Make your knowledge base feel like a natural extension of your company — customize it with your brand logo and colors.
Choose a publishing workflow that suits your team. Make changes instantly viewable in your knowledge base or keep them in draft mode until you are ready to publish.
Format documents exactly the way you want. Create your own custom document templates and share them across teams.
Add dedicated Aha! Knowledge users, so that stakeholders have access to your documentation, but not your full product roadmap.
For a breakdown of Aha! Knowledge functionality — and further details about how to use it with Aha! Roadmaps — compare the two Aha! products.
Use Aha! Roadmaps and Aha! Develop together
From roadmaps to release dates, product and engineering teams depend on each other to build lovable software — and ship it on time. But while they collaborate closely, each team needs its own tool. Product teams use Aha! Roadmaps to define strategy and create ambitious plans. Engineering teams use Aha! Develop to prioritize the backlog, estimate work, and plan sprints.
The two tools integrate seamlessly — no data mapping required. Each team has their own space (and their own customizations) but share work items.
Product managers assign work to engineering teams who can also import work items with importer extensions, or create their own records to cover engineering priorities.
Both teams use a unified backlog to collaborate on the most valuable work.
Both teams share customized views of the records — but retain their own workflows and statuses.
Both teams can report on each other's custom fields and save and share sophisticated reports.
For a detailed walkthrough of how Aha! Roadmaps and Aha! Develop work together in one Aha! account, read this integration guide.
Pick the right Aha! plan
Ready to get started? First, pick an Aha! product and plan type for your account. Your selection will not limit your team — as your needs grow, you can always add additional Aha! products, or enable the advanced functionality included in different plan types.
Aha! products can be used individually or together to create an integrated product development environment:
Aha! Roadmaps comes with four plans — Startup, Premium, Enterprise, and Enterprise+
Add on Aha! Ideas Advanced to any plan for sophisticated idea management functionality such as dynamic idea submission forms, Salesforce integration, in-app feedback, empathy sessions, and more.
Add on Aha! Whiteboards Advanced for advanced whiteboarding capabilities like wireframes, custom whiteboard templates, voting sessions, and more.
Add on Aha! Knowledge Advanced to create custom note templates and publish external knowledge bases.
Add on Aha! Develop Advanced to Aha! Roadmaps Enterprise and Enterprise+ plans to create a unified product development environment with shared records, unique workflows, and fully transparent collaboration.
Aha! Ideas comes with two plans — Essentials and Advanced.
Add on any Aha! Roadmaps plan to bring customer feedback into the planning process. Promote ideas to your roadmap and automatically notify idea subscribers of status updates.
Aha! Whiteboards is offered as both a standalone product and tightly integrated with existing Aha! products where it will improve upon existing whiteboarding and mockups capabilities. Aha! Whiteboards comes with two plan options — Essentials and Advanced.
Aha! Knowledge is offered as both a standalone product and tightly integrated with existing Aha! products where it will improve upon existing notes and documentation capabilities. Aha! Knowledge also includes essential whiteboarding functionality. It comes with two plan options — Essentials and Advanced.
Aha! Develop comes with two plan options — Essentials and Advanced.
Add on Aha! Roadmaps Enterprise or Enterprise+ to create a unified product development environment with full strategic context, seamless progress updates, and advanced reporting.
Try one (or all) of the Aha! products yourself, or join a live customer demo. We do not have salespeople here at Aha! — just passionate product experts.
