Aha! Roadmaps vs. HYPE Enterprise

• 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.

Well Suited

• Idea Generation campaigns aimed at solving a specific problem. Contributors can be limited to certain groups, or it can be open to the whole organization.
• Open Innovation campaigns aimed at getting solutions from external sources (add-on module required).
• Continuous improvement process specific to functional areas.
• Processing, sorting, evaluating and scoring ideas.

Not Well Suited

• Surveys
• Managing Projects

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

• Hype Innovation allows for a full onsite implementation behind a firewall and does not need to communicate to an external server. This is a major advantage for a defense company.
• Hype Innovation is easily configurable by a systems admin with very limited knowledge of the product.
• Product Updates are rolled out quarterly and offered to all clients.
• Hype Innovation has a specific instance of their Hype software platform that is aimed at their clients and improving Hype itself. Feedback from their management is very quick.

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

• The concepts and projects module requires an overhaul to be more flexible. This is on their product roadmap.
• The software would benefit from the addition of an MS Exchange integration for receiving idea e-mails.
• Customisation of the layout and possible custom components is challenging.

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

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

After evaluating numerous idea management and innovation management platforms, the main reasons we chose Hype Innovation were:

• On-premises installation (Viima did not allow this);
• Cost (Viima and IdeaDrop had substantially higher costs for the amount of users we required);
• Ease of Configuration (Viima was easiest to configure, but IdeaDrop was a challenge.);
• Customer Service (From initial contact to roll-out was 5 weeks).

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

• Longstanding issues with products and services have been made visible to the wider company and many solutions have been identified.
• A common idea management platform has allowed management to gauge the level of employee involvement and cross functional communication.
• Safe storage and archiving of ideas has enabled the company to keep track of inputs over time and refer back to ideas that were not relevant at the time of generation.
• The added workload of managing the innovation platform has meant that more money has had to be spent on the individual responsible for the platform.

Incentivized