Just Launched! — Create Custom Views of Your Product Strategy

Every business has a purpose. Each is created with some intent — to offer a product or service that customers find useful. And the more clear its purpose is, the better chance it has of achieving it. No business exists simply to exist. Because time is limited and valuable.

So, if a successful business has a purpose and goals it wants to achieve, where does it start? It starts with a clear vision of where it is headed and the value its products and services will deliver.

This is called strategy.

We believe strategy is fundamental to building great product. For this reason, we recommend that you use Aha! to set your vision, goals, and strategic initiatives. This enables you to create a red thread of strategy through the roadmapping process by linking strategic initiatives to releases and features.

And when you link your strategy to your roadmap, your strategy dictates what you should invest in. Your strategy helps you say “Yes” to the work that matters and “No” to the distractions and detractors.

Today, we added key functionality to Aha! to enhance your ability to capture and manage your product strategy.

You can now add custom fields to your strategic initiatives and create highly visual views of your product strategy. This makes it easy to capture information that is unique to your business and compare your strategic initiatives across your product portfolio. And once you do, you can create and share high-level executive reports and timelines with the team.

Here are a few reasons why we believe strategic planning in Aha! just got a whole lot better.

Add custom fields to initiatives It’s time to prioritize what matters. Capture unique information about your product strategy using custom fields. Then, prioritize your initiatives based on value and effort. In the example below we have added several custom fields including Kickoff, Investment required, Projected revenue, and Partners. You can see that you can capture just about any type of custom data.

You can add custom fields to initiatives under Product settings in the settings menu.

Prioritize which initiatives to fund Make more intelligent investment decisions about your product based on data. By reviewing all of your strategic initiatives in a list, you can compare the business value and relative status of your top priorities. This allows you to create a “system of record” to record strategic product initiatives across the company and keep them aligned.

Create executive reports on initiative status Executive teams want to see a high-level view of the major initiatives. Use the Reports Timeline to view your strategy across a single product or an entire portfolio of products. You can use custom views here to report on the progress of initiatives, using the timeline control to display the exact date range needed.

Look out over a few weeks, a few months, or a few quarters with a few clicks and decide what data to present right on the view. Here we are showing each initiative, when it is scheduled to be completed, the revenue impact, and its status.

Adding custom views to your strategy allows you to connect your strategy all the way through the roadmapping process. Ultimately, that means every feature and requirement will align with your vision so you can build what matters.

Strategy does not make the organization, the organization makes the Strategy. And the best strategies answer: where do we want to go, what is it like there, and what do we need to do to get there.

Signup for a free Aha! trial — be happy Better strategic planning 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 of Aha! now to see why over 20,000 users trust Aha! to set product strategy, create visual roadmaps, and prioritize releases and features.