Aha! Roadmaps vs. ProdPad

• 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.

We use ProdPad to capture notes from our sales team within our CRM and then integrate them into our product roadmap. Our product development team utilizes the application daily to track progress, make comments and notes on new ideas, and to visualize progress.

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

• Customer feedback collection and classification.
• Push user stories as issues to GitHub or tickets to Jira or items in a Trello board.
• Present a clear and easy-to-use roadmap to users internal or external at the organization.

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 linking of fields between ProdPad and Jira isn't ideal, and leads to some duplication.
• The use of real estate on the Release view could be improved.

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

We've never had any issues with support. They have always been helpful and timely in responding.

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

We were just capturing ideas in an Excel workbook, but that forced ownership to a single user for changes and updates and there wasn't any direct integration with project backlog. We actually didn't select ProdPad, a new VP came and brought it with him because it worked so well at his last place. Everybody here jumped on board, though.

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

• Using ProdPad has helped our Product team avoid becoming a black hole for feedback and feature requests. This tool helps us be responsive and communicative about the data flowing into the product.

Incentivized