Aha! Roadmaps vs. airfocus

• Aha! is the all around product management tool. You need something once you build out a product management role and grow beyond a small scrum team with one or two products. JIRA, Pivotal, and project management tools don't cut it for aligning [engineering] with product initiatives once the backlog starts to scale.
• On the other hand, there are several unfinished features that my peers all admit to having to work around: Capacity Planning, Salesforce Integration, Roadmap Display Flexibility, User Feedback, etc. This year has been all about reporting in terms of feature releases. As Aha! grows, they will fill in these other areas, so stay tuned.

Airfocus is as well suited for large product teams that have several members working on the same product line as it is for a product team of one. For large teams, the collaboration tools that come in the out-of-the-box solution act as a huge timesaver. Frankly speaking, it will help eliminate a lot of resource-intensive face-to-face meetings. For individual managers, the visualization tools can really help organize disparate ideas into a cohesive product roadmap.

One flaw of airfocus is that it fails to live up to its ultimate utility because–like many SaaS products–it is dependent on the entire team, to include all stakeholders, to buy into the solution if it is to be a true one-stop solution for product roadmapping. However, there is no denying it greatly helps in getting teams a little bit closer to the goal of effective collaboration.

Incentivized

• Work breakdown - it allows teams to do initiatives, capabilities features and stories all in the same product release.
• Roadmapping - allows for simple combined visual plan of work breakdown across multiple initiatives.
• Customization - allows different levels of work breakdowns to be available on different projects.
• Integration with Rally and other tools.

Incentivized

• Scalable.
• Multiple integrations, including Jira, Trello, Monday.com and more...
• Help run our sprints.

Incentivized

• Notes - There's not a great place to leave lots of notes or instructions, almost like a Confluence page. Although not required, it would be nice to have this built in.
• Learning curve - As with most new tools, there's a bit of a learning curve to become proficient.

Incentivized

• Sharing of finished products (e.g., road maps) via downloading or PDF docs could be a bit less high touch than they currently are. The product works best when all stakeholders have a seat but not all stakeholders (i.e. non-product team members) like to work that way, exporting options for them could be better.
• Customization (look & feel) options are pretty limited.
• JIRA integration only works for JIRA in the cloud customers.

Incentivized

If you have the time and resources there really isn't anything you can't get Aha! to do for you in regards to managing workflow and releases. The Prioritization features are top of its class, the dashboards are getting better and better every day and the team all seem to really enjoy using it to manage their workloads.

Incentivized

When we signed up for Aha!, we were assigned an Aha! team members to help us with training/questions. The meeting was set weekly, and it exponentially helped with our familiarity with Aha! Support is beneficial and has a lot of experience working with product teams.

Incentivized

It seems like a small team, but they're very responsive even though they're in Europe, and we're in the US.

Incentivized

productboard was used in the organization when I arrived, but after assessing productboard, I felt it was too lightweight for our ambitious product goals. It's also critical, especially in a startup, that we focus our limited capacity on the work that matters most. Aha! far and away had superior capabilities in defining strategy directly in the product and associating all of our work to the strategy. Aha! is a serious product management tool and I found productboard to be more of a simple backlog management tool.

Incentivized

It's easy to use, it's customizable. It is ideal for managing multiple product lists, it is transparent and helps keep any work team centralized. It has an intuitive interface, special to track the time to our established goals.

Incentivized

• It has been able to deliver a good overall view of all the items we have going on in ADO.
• We are in the process of transforming from waterfall to agile development and to be able to see an overall picture of the work items is invaluable.

Incentivized

• We know exactly what the impact/effort is of our projects, so we don't waste time on projects or features that won't drive meaningful revenue or increased brand affinity.

Incentivized