September 20, 2015 release notes

New

• Significant updates to the Strategy tab are now available to further facilitate building great products by starting with a brilliant strategy. Each of these updates provide a canvas to work with to set your own strategy and describe the details of your unique business model. The collective is known as the Aha! Business Model Builder. Updates include the following:

  • A new Strategy - Overview tab containing a set of secondary tabs for Vision, Business Model, Personas, and Competitors.

  • An updated Vision screen for documenting components of your vision and the market landscape. Visualization options have been updated to display the components in a circle or rectangular chart and you can specify the number of components displayed up to a maximum of nine.

  • The new Business Model tab empowers you to visually represent your business model for your product, product line or company and define how you will go to market, all on a single page. Default components include the challenge, solution, value proposition, competitive advantage, key metrics, operating costs, and revenue streams.

  • The new Personas tab enables you to build detailed personas for both buyers and users providing context for the organization to better understand the customers and users of your products. Capture things such as descriptions, likes, dislikes, educational background, income, top of mind issues, and more. You can also include an image of the persona to put a face to the user.

    • A new custom field type called "Personas" has been added to complement the Persona builder functionality. Create a new custom field of this type for Features, Ideas, Releases, Initiatives, or Products and it will automatically allow you to select from personas defined for that product.

  • The new Competitors tab allows you to create comprehensive profiles of your competitors and to visualize where different competitors stack up against your own products in the following new views:

    • The "Competitor Detail" view is where you can profile your competitors capturing information such as the # of employees, revenue, pricing, growth rate, products, key markets, and more.

    • The "Competitive Landscape" view allows for visualizing where different competitors stack up against your own products on a quadrant where you can choose from Product Breadth, Ability to Execute, Strength of Vision, and "Market Awareness" to represent the x and y axis.

    • You can toggle between the two views in the upper right corner of the page.

Improvements

• Several customization, branding, and usability updates to Idea Portals driven by customer feedback are now available and consist of the following:

  • You can now customize email branding as well as create your own email templates for Idea Portals in the Settings - Account - Configure idea portals page. This means you can now send out email confirmations and updates from your Idea Portals with your own custom branding. You can also customize the subject line and body of each email for "Thank You", "Status Changed", "Admin Response", and "New Comment" messages.

• • • Upon making changes to your email branding and/or templates, you can send yourself a test email by clicking on the "Save and send test" button at the bottom of the page.

    • You can now override the default interface button names and fields for the idea creation form on the Settings - Account - Configure Ideas Portal - Terminology tab.

    • Add custom favicons for your own brand in Settings - Account - Configure Ideas Portal - Portal Branding.

    • The external Ideas Portal page now contains a "My Votes" link which will filter the page to only display the ideas you have voted on.

    • Already viewed ideas now display with a lighter font to help you distinguish between read and unread ideas.

    • The "Export Users" feature in Settings - Account - Configure Ideas Portal - Portal Users tab has been updated to include the calculated values displayed on this page which include idea, comment, and vote counts by user.

    • Embedded Idea Portals in a branded website now have unique URL's enabling you to drill down to individual ideas and to copy-paste the URL to send to someone.

    • The Slack integration has been updated so comments made in a public Idea Portal streaming into the Slack channel will now display the public idea portal url link instead of the Aha-internal link.

    • Idea categories are now available for selection when Aha! users add new ideas from directly within the application through the "Add Idea" form.

• You can now select the product color in Settings - Product - Configure (assignee, scorecard, capacity, workflow, ideas). This color is used to represent releases for that product in the Home - Portfolio view as well as in the Pivot and Timeline reports when selecting Product as the "color by" field.

• Custom field tags have been made more readable when printing Notebook PDF's.

• Product prefix and release names are now shown in front of the dependency display for release phases. This provides added clarity as to the product and release source of the dependency or dependent which is valuable when phase names are often the same across releases.