Aha! Roadmaps | Introduction to strategy

In the Strategy tab, you can capture your strategy for each level of the workspace hierarchy — beginning with your workspace and rolling all the way up to the company level. You should link your strategy to the work your team completes as well, so that every feature, release, or idea has a clear connection to your strategic vision and every person on your team can see that strategic connection.

Strategy in Aha! Roadmaps has three key interrelated parts: Foundation, Market, and Imperatives.

In the Foundation section, you will visualize your strategic vision and tie it to business models and positioning templates — all of which can be shared or added to a presentation to give your stakeholders context.

The Market section focuses on your competitor and persona profiles. Build out the details about who your competitors are and the customers you are both trying to attract. Then plot your place in the competitive landscape and tie the work you do with the persona who will benefit from it.

Use the Imperatives section to create a bridge between your overall strategy and your releases and features — the work it will take to make your strategy a reality. Strategic goals enable you to focus the team on the top 3–5 business drivers that you want to accomplish with your product over the next 3–12 months. Strategic initiatives focus on which efforts you must complete to accomplish your goals and can be mapped to releases and features.

Click any of the following links to skip ahead:

• Foundation

  • Overview

  • Vision

  • Models

  • Positioning

  • Creative briefs

• Market

  • Personas

  • Competitors

• Imperatives

  • Goals

  • Initiatives

• Share your strategy

Foundation

Overview

Add a description that defines your workspace. The language that is used here is often the same language that is used in the boilerplate on the press release to describe your company and the products or services it offers. You can also choose to describe your workspace differently — if your workspace represents a digital marketing team, for example, part of a larger marketing line, you might want to use this space to talk about what you are excited about your team accomplishing together.

You may also enhance this page with custom fields to add additional data to your overview, and a logo for reference in competitor views.

Navigate to Strategy Overview to get started.

The Overview page is hidden by default for new Aha! Roadmaps accounts. If you would like to enable it, you can do so by customizing your menu navigation.

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Vision

Your vision provides a high-level view of the opportunity, how you are going to pursue it and the challenges you will need to overcome. It captures the essence of what you want to achieve and it is critical information your team must understand to develop and maintain a winning product, service, or program.

Navigate to Strategy Vision to get started.

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Models

Your business model represents the foundational elements of your workspace. The model builder in Aha! Roadmaps allows you to clearly articulate, develop, innovate, and pivot your business model — on a single page.

Navigate to Strategy Models to get started.

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Positioning

You need to position yourself in the market — articulate the problems that you plan to solve, and differentiate yourself from your competitors. The positioning step helps your team to document exactly why the work you're doing matters — and what problems you can solve uniquely.

Navigate to Strategy Positioning to get started.

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Creative briefs

If you work in marketing, then you are likely familiar with a creative brief. It connects your business goals to your marketing objectives and ensures that everyone involved in your project has the same context as they tackle your next set of challenges.

Navigate to Strategy Creative briefs from any marketing workspace to get started.

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Market

Personas

Personas represent those very real people who need your product, service, or program. They allow your entire team to empathize with your customer's pain points and better understand their needs. Personas can be automatically tied to features by adding the Persona custom field.

Navigate to Strategy Personas to get started.

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Competitors

Defining your competitors in Aha! Roadmaps allows you to better prioritize your own roadmap based on competitive movement. You can easily share this competitive information with the team by adding it to an Aha! Roadmaps presentation.

Navigate to Strategy Competitors to get started.

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Imperatives

Goals

Your goals must have a measurable end result that can be achieved within a fixed time frame. They should represent the crucial accomplishments needed to make your vision a reality.

Goals highlight what you hope to accomplish and are often stepping stones to accelerating business growth and explaining bolder objectives. They should also be reasonably easy to track, so you know how your team is performing against them. You can roll up goals from the workspace to the line level so that there is visibility across the organization for all contributions towards a strategic goal delivery. You can link your goals to the time frame in which they are expected to be completed.

You can visualize how your strategy ties together at each level of your organization. Add up to five levels of roll-up goals and initiatives to custom roadmaps and pivot tables in Aha! Roadmaps.

Example goals:

• Increase revenue by 30%

• Grow the number of customers by 10x

• Expand into 5 new countries

• Increase mobile adoption by 100%

• Reduce the number of support tickets

Navigate to Strategy Goals to get started.

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Initiatives

Initiatives specify key work that must be completed to achieve your goals. Think of these efforts as high-level projects that should be accomplished within a specified period of time — even if this is over a few months. Workspace-level initiatives can be rolled up to line-level initiatives so that work at the workspace level can automatically roll up to drive company-level strategy. You can link your initiatives to the time frame in which they are expected to be completed, and you can create custom initiative description templates to standardize initiatives across every workspace that uses the same custom workflow.

You can visualize how your strategy ties together at each level of your organization. Add up to five levels of roll-up goals and initiatives to custom roadmaps and pivot tables in Aha! Roadmaps.

Example initiatives:

• Performance improvements

• UI Improvements

• Better reporting

• Increased campaign engagement

• Language localization

• Mobilization

• Self-serviceability improvements

• Better analytics

Navigate to Strategy Initiatives to get started.

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Share your strategy

You can easily share any view in the Strategy section with your stakeholders by selecting one of the export options under the Share menu on the top right of the page.

• To fold your view into a presentation, select Add to presentation. In your presentation, you can select the view's update frequency.

• For a static version of your view, export your view to PNG image or PDF document.

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