Aha! Roadmaps vs. Powernoodle

• 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:

• Groups needing to make a decision
• Democratically based decision making
• Sensitive topics
• Discussions Groups needing input

• 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

• Powernoodle helped us to engage a wider and more diverse spectrum of people than we ever thought possible.
• The customer service is wonderful, I really enjoyed working with their employees to create a safe space for our end users, which ultimately gave us great results.
• Very user-friendly.
• People felt comfortable with Powernoodle and trust the anaominty of it, so they could speak their minds without fear of backlash.

• 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

• Our group found that it was sometimes difficult to respond immediately to directions from the facilitator, and that we needed time to absorb what was written on the tiles and what we were being asked to do. This put us behind on the schedule laid out for us. Part of the reason for this is, I'm sure, the fact that Powernoodle was new to all of us.
• Merging tiles that were similar is something only the facilitator can do, but it was confusing at times for our group to work together to decide which tiles should be merged. I think each of us should have emailed the facilitator with our ideas for merging tiles, however, this didn't happen with our group. We ended up having additional "private" meetings without the facilitator to make decisions about what should be merged. Perhaps there is a better way to handle this important step of merging tiles.

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

• 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

• While we are still in the beginning stages of taking action on the decisions we made using the Powernoodle process, I have no doubt that there will be a very positive ROI on our overall objectives.