Just Launched! — Build and Share Your Own Strategic Planning Templates

“I love the new strategic models!” This was a note that a happy customer shared with us last week after we launched the new templates. We are always delighted when people take the time to send a note of thanks. And we are glad to see the enthusiasm for the new strategy capabilities.

In case you missed it, we introduced a new set of strategic planning models — Lean Canvas, SWOT, Porter’s 5 Forces, Segment Profile, and 9 Ps Marketing Matrix. But many of you had a question: Is it possible to create your own templates? The answer is yes.

You can build your own strategic planning templates in Aha! and share them across your organization.

By adding your own templates, you can establish a consistent framework for analyzing market and business conditions. Create an entirely new template or start from one of the example templates. Then share it across your product lines and products so that everyone can use the same approach.

Here is how to create, share, and use strategic planning templates in your Aha! account:

Create a custom strategic planning template To add a new template, product owners can start with a blank canvas or use one of our six examples. Add components, customize the layout, and edit the component names and colors. You can also include a placeholder description to guide the team as they fill in the details.

To create a new template, navigate to Settings Product Strategic models.

Share your template across the organization After you customize the design, make the template available across your product lines and products. Our advice is to build the model at the highest level in your product hierarchy so that it can be inherited by all child product lines and products.

Only templates created at the product-line level can be inherited by child products.

Update your strategic planning template As you make improvements to your template, edits are automatically applied to all of the linked models. This keeps your strategic planning models consistent — while also saving you from making manual updates.

You can easily see which models are using your template.

Use a shared template To add a model using a template, navigate to Strategy Models and click Add model and then Shared templates. You can fill in the description for each component and publish the completed model as an Aha! notebook, image, or PDF. The layout, component names, and colors are not editable — they are locked to ensure consistency.

Product owners and contributors can unlink their model from the master template by clicking the dropdown next to the Linked to… template description. Once unlinked, the layout, component names, and colors can be edited. Note that a model cannot be relinked to a template.

You must be a product owner in Aha! to create custom templates. Contributors can add models from existing templates — while reviewers and viewers can view strategic models.

Now you can ensure that everyone on your team is taking the same approach to strategic planning.

With six strategic planning models ready to use — plus the ability to create your own templates — Aha! makes it easy to set a consistent strategy framework across your organization.

Sign up for a free Aha! trial — be happy Strategic models are 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 of Aha! now to see why more than 150,000 users trust Aha! to set product strategy, create visual roadmaps, and prioritize releases and features.

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