Our Favorite Product Features of 2015 (So Far)

Time really flies when you are busy helping product teams get their mojo back. With more than 10,000 users and hundreds of new companies using Aha! each month, we see amazing feature requests submitted every day.

Our goal at Aha! is to help product managers build better products and be happy doing it. So for us, being responsive to our customers is more than a tagline — it’s the method that we live by each day.

We believe that building great products should be invigorating, and that product management is the greatest job in the world. 70% of product updates to Aha! are suggested by our users. That’s why so far, in 2015, we have delivered more than 10 new and improved features, as well as 6 new integrations.

Here are our favorite new features so far. We can’t wait to build more in 2015:

New Features

Better Ideas Portals Many of you asked for the ability to have one corporate Idea portal for all of your products and allow idea submitters to choose which specific product their idea related to. Now you can! For example, you could create a public, submit-only portal for customers and a private portal for employees. You can have as many portals as you need per product.

Product Notes Notes are wiki-like pages to capture loose or unorganized product and team related information. Notes are perfect for unstructured information that doesn’t belong on your product roadmap — including meeting notes, user personas, and competitive research.

@ and # Mentions You’ve likely used “mentions” in tools ranging from Twitter to Slack. Now, they are in Aha! as well! Mentions (often known as @mentions) are great for drawing users’ attention to a page or comment, assigning tasks, and clarifying responsibilities. Now, we have unlocked a whole new level of collaboration in Aha! with new ways to communicate. You can mention users, features, ideas, and releases easily.

CSV Import The new universal import screen allows you to quickly add all of your product information into Aha! from a CSV file. This streamlines testing and adoption of Aha! You can use this new capability to import many types of information, including products; initiatives; releases; ideas; features; and users.

Custom Branding Customize Aha! to match the look and feel of your company’s branding, so the app is instantly recognizable to your users. Notebooks can now be custom branded as well as the Aha! application. When the time comes to share your brilliant strategy or visual product roadmap, your company logo is displayed in the Notebook as a Web page or PDF.

Product Files Now, it’s even easier to make Aha! your home for everything product management. Product Files is a new section under the Product tab. This section allows you to view the entire collection of files and images that have been attached to your releases, ideas, features, and comments in Aha!

Improved Roadmap Timeline The new Timeline is more beautiful, easier to use, and allows you to better customize the view that is necessary for your audience. It gives you the ability to add additional details, while also controlling what you communicate. Here are some key features of the new Roadmap Timeline screen.

Feature Dependencies We extended our Portfolio Roadmap functionality to benefit the entire product team. This is the best way for product teams to visualize their upcoming releases and feature dependencies.

Advanced Scorecards We rolled out the ability to create complex equations which allow you to better map feature prioritization to your business objectives. The Aha! scorecards got a lot better with support for simple and advanced equations in the scorecard editor. The editor is used to define custom equations for scoring features and ideas.

Enhanced Notebooks The new Aha! Notebooks are terrific. You can create as many as you need and take nearly any view you’ve already built in Aha! to quickly share it via a PDF or secure web page. Now you can lock notebooks down via a passcode and by limiting access to only your approved users of Aha!

New Integrations

Salesforce Our Salesforce integration makes Sales and Product Management alignment easier. It creates a holistic view of your customer through a two-way integration between Aha! and Salesforce. This integration empowers companies to invest in the ideas that matter most by linking customer opportunities in Salesforce with ideas in Aha!

Visual Studio TFS This integration with TFS Online makes it easy for product management to set brilliant product strategy and share visual roadmaps. At the same time, engineering can continue to work in Visual Studio TFS. This integration supports Visual Studio TFS Online. When Microsoft makes the REST API available, we plan to add support for the on-premise version as well. Microsoft has suggested that this is coming later in Q1 as part of Visual Studio 2015.

Rally Do your planning in Aha! Then, move your features and requirements into Rally with no hassle. This integration allows you to push features and requirements from Aha! to Rally online. When you have completed your product roadmap and feature planning in Aha! you can move features into Rally for the engineering team to work on. You can send them individually or in bulk.

Single Sign-On with Google Apps and SAML 2.0 More than 5 million businesses use Google Apps. Single Sign-On through Google allows users of your Aha! account to log in using existing Google credentials. You can also enable SSO through other popular identity providers such as OneLogin, Okta, PingIdentity, and many more. This means users don’t have to keep track of yet another email and password. More importantly, it grants admins the ability to add and revoke user access centrally.

Bugzilla This integration allows you to push your completed features and requirements in Aha! into Bugzilla so that engineering teams can continue to do their work. Complete your feature planning in Aha! Then, move your features into Bugzilla individually or in bulk for either a sprint or release.

Be happy – sign up for a free Aha! trial These features and integrations are available to all Aha! customers. If you are not already an Aha! customer, sign up for a free 30 day trial. See why over 10,000 users trust Aha! to set product strategy, create visual roadmaps, and prioritize releases and features.