Aha! Roadmaps | Idea management overview

Crowdsourcing feedback helps you understand exactly what your customers want so you can build a lovable product.

Aha! Roadmaps includes essential idea management capabilities for capturing, reviewing, and prioritizing requests in a central location.

Promote the best ideas directly to your roadmap, then track requests from concept to delivery and keep customers informed as you go.

To share more information about the status of ideas submitted by customers, you can publish more details — like who the ideas is assigned to or what release it was shipped with — for an enhanced portal experience.

Click below to watch the video, or scroll down to follow along with a transcript!

Transcript

Hi, this is Claire from aha! Today we're going to talk about crowdsourcing feedback so you can understand exactly what your customers want and build a lovable product.

Aha! Roadmaps includes essential idea management capabilities for capturing, reviewing, and prioritizing requests in one system. You can promote the best ideas directly to your roadmap, making it super easy to track requests from concept to delivery and keep customers informed as you go.

Ideas portals

Let's take a look at how you can drive innovation and delight your customers. Idea management hinges on having a central place for customers, partners, and employees to share suggestions and ask for what they need. That's what an ideas portal is for. You can create as many portals as you want and invite unlimited users, giving everyone in your community a voice.

You choose who has access and exactly what they see. For example, you might want to create a public portal for customers and a private portal for employees. With this setup, you can have the same ideas in both portals but employees have the freedom to view and share internal information.

You can add portals to each workspace in your account or you can configure one portal for all of your workspaces. You have full flexibility to structure an idea management process that matches the way your organization gathers feedback.

Create a new portal

To create a new ideas portal, navigate to Ideas in your workspace and click Add idea portal. Then you can quickly set up the basics in three steps.

• First, give your portal a unique name.

• Second, select a theme color to match your branding.

• And third, choose the access level. You have two options: Private requires users to log into your portal while Public allows anyone to submit and view ideas.

Now you're ready to make the portal your own. Capture exactly the information you need by creating custom fields and updating the layout of your ideas submission form. Upload your company's logo to ensure a consistent branding experience for users and customize everything from email communications and terminology.

Collect ideas

Now you're ready to start collecting ideas. Users can browse Recently submitted, Trending, and Popular ideas from the portal's homepage. They can also search for a specific idea by name and then add their vote or create an entirely new one.

As ideas roll in, you can start evaluating which ones merit inclusion in your future product plans right away. Use the Ideas overview page to manage recently submitted requests. Here, you can categorize ideas by theme, add tags, and fill in additional details.

If you still have questions about what your customers actually want, commenting on ideas is a great way to start a conversation and gain more insights. Then score each idea to prioritize and determine which ones will have the biggest business impact. Use the default scorecard or create your own with custom metrics.

Idea notifications

And as you do all of this, it's easy to keep your portal users up to date. Automatic notifications inform anyone who created, voted for, or commented on an idea of any status updates. So even when you have to say no to an idea, you're still able to close the feedback loop. Transparency like this instills confidence in your community that their ideas are actively being reviewed.

Ideas list view

To further analyze feedback, choose from two powerful views. Use a list view to quickly sort and evaluate ideas based on criteria, such as number of votes.

Ideas priorities chart

Or choose a priorities chart to determine which requests will have the most impact on your business and your community.

Promote ideas

Now that you know which ideas your customers care about most, you can easily promote the best ones to your roadmap. This is a key part of the idea management process because it's what enables you to seamlessly track ideas from concept to delivery.

Ideas Advanced

If you need broad options for collecting ideas and empathizing with your community, upgrade your roadmaps account to include Ideas Advanced. Ideas Advanced provides portal translation, custom domain URLs, and proxy voting. You also get access to empathy sessions and in-app feedback to help you fully engage your community.

Need help? Use the question mark in your account to get help from an expert. Start integrating customer ideas into your plans. Sign up for a free 30-day trial of Aha! Roadmaps or request to join a live demo.

Our Customer Success team have deep product experience and respond incredibly fast. We want to help you capture every bright idea to achieve breakthrough innovation. So what are you waiting for?