New in Aha! — A Better Way to Manage Product Launches

Managing product launches is an important job for product managers. And it takes a team effort to bring a complete product to market. Product managers must first define the feature, then engineers build it, support handles documentation, and marketing organizes go-to-market activities.

There are many phases of a product launch — even beyond the list above — but a critical characteristic of a successful launch is clear communication across teams.

We just delivered greater control over how you communicate product launch notifications. When shipping a new product release, you now have the ability to choose whether or not to notify your team members by email.

Here’s why we are excited to share this new ability with you today:

Communicate product launches The purpose of a product launch is to deliver customer value. And delivering customer value requires that the new functionality works well and your team is prepared to support it. That is why Aha! allows you to proactively notify your team members who are in Aha! of a new release. The “notify release watchers” checkbox allows you to do that. You can even add custom ship notes to communicate critical details around your product launch.

If you need to make changes to a shipped release later on, the new notification checkbox allows you to make those changes without notifying your team again.

This new notification feature builds on our existing release management capabilities that are highlighted below:

Planning your release — before it ships There is a lot of work that goes into preparing for a product launch. And product releases are complex and may contain many phases and dependencies. The releases roadmap makes it easy to manage your product launches, and elevate and identify relevant work to cross-functional teams.

With the ability to visualize those cross-functional efforts in a roadmap view, you can reinforce your release plan and emphasize each team’s contributions.

Track and assign work across teams Going one level deeper — beyond high-level phases and dependencies — there are usually many individual tasks that need to be completed before you launch. Drill into the release drawer view and you can assign tasks that relate to the launch, as well as indicate who is responsible for completing them.

You can also create and assign To-dos in the drawer view of each phase and milestone within the release. Comments within each view ensure collaboration across teams.

Report on and share release progress Sometimes you need to be able to view all of your upcoming launches at a glance. Using a pivot table report you can create views of your planned releases in upcoming time frames and even customize the columns and filters.

To report on and share the progress of each release, build reports by status and choose display colors that reflect that status.

Product launches can be complex. But with team-wide collaboration, clear communication of progress and status, and a defined process for each new release, you can continue to build momentum — and bring great products to market.

Sign up for a free Aha! trial — be happy Better launch management is available to all Aha! customers. If you are not already an Aha! customer, you may want to sign up for a free 30 day trial now. See why over 50,000 users trust Aha! to set product strategy, create visual roadmaps, prioritize features, and capture ideas.