Aha! Tutorial Highlights: Build Impressive Roadmaps With the Right Details

Successful product teams are powered by great strategy and plans. This is why we offer product management training through Aha! Academy and regularly host live tutorials — helping you use Aha! software to build better products. Of course we hope you can attend our tutorials live — it is the best way to learn from our product experts and ask questions in real time. You can also visit our Knowledge Base to brush up on recent tutorial topics.

This month, Aha! experts Mark Eaves and Rose Smith covered how to build a roadmap with the right level of detail for three key audiences — customers, teammates, and leadership.

Read on (and watch the recording) to learn how to tailor your roadmaps to the right audience and effectively share product plans.

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The truth is that anyone can build a roadmap. But not every roadmap engages its audience or conveys the right message. Before you share your roadmap, you need to know what your audience actually cares about and the context they need in order to understand your product plans. In this way you can tailor a roadmap view that speaks to their interests and even sparks inspiration.

We polled tutorial attendees to get a sense of who they are building roadmap views for. The results are clear — product teams are sharing roadmaps with, well, everyone.

All of these stakeholders require unique takeaways. What is powerful about every roadmap view in Aha! Roadmaps is its connection to the Aha! data model. Data can be shared across roadmaps to unlock the specific visualization you need. So you can enter product data once and quickly build distinctive roadmaps.

Here are three approaches to roadmaps for the audiences that product teams present to most often:

Strategic view for leadership

Imagine that you want to share progress against initiatives with the leadership team. Try the strategic roadmap for a high-level view — where executives can view initiatives by status to understand which are on track and which need attention. You can share this roadmap to a dashboard and add other relevant reports to round out the story. The dashboard gives leaders one spot to view initiatives on a timeline, filter by product, and review progress.

See how to add a strategic roadmap to a dashboard

Portfolio view for cross-functional teams

More products in your portfolio introduces more complexity. When you want to showcase to the team how each product is contributing to overall product goals, use the portfolio roadmap. It provides a visualization of initiatives and related releases across products. Or build a custom roadmap to show the status of other related work — epics, features, or dependencies, for example. Share your roadmap as a webpage and send teammates a quick link to the plans. Enable interactive record drill-down so the team can self-serve on the details that matter to them — you can fully customize the fields displayed, from budget information to business units impacted.

Watch Rose build a custom roadmap of portfolio initiatives

Highlighted features for customers

Users of both Aha! Ideas Advanced and Aha! Roadmaps love the new ability to embed their choice of roadmap to show their community what is coming next. The features roadmap works well for an external audience as you can easily control the details with filters and record drill-down. You can also add a custom field for a customer-facing feature description, so customers can learn more about functionality without seeing internal information.

Learn how to publish your roadmap on a portal page

Help the community understand your product development plans by giving them exactly what they need — so they can join in on the anticipation for what you are building.

Have questions about what you see here? Let us know how we can help or schedule a demo. And we would love to see you at the next live tutorial.

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