Aha! Roadmaps | Strategy overview

Start using Aha! Roadmaps to capture your strategy. First, define your strategic plans in three different sections of Aha! Roadmaps — Foundation, Market, and Imperatives.

Then, link your strategy to the actual work you need to complete, so that every feature, release, or idea has a clear connection to your goals and initiatives.

Note: In this video, we will build strategy in a product workspace. Aha! Roadmaps has six different workspace types to choose from, each optimized for a given function, with their own unique navigation and terminology. Regardless of what workspace types you choose, strategy is at the heart of the work that your team needs to accomplish.

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

Transcript

Hi, this is Claire from Aha! Today I'm going to show you how to set strategy. As you know, a clear strategy is fundamental to building lovable products.

So let's get started. There are three major aspects to strategy in Aha! — foundation, market and imperatives.

Foundation

Foundation is where you define your vision, build strategic models, and create positioning.

Your vision is the big picture for where you want your product to be in the future. We created a template for you to start from based on industry best practices and our many years of product management experience. Then you can customize the components.

Strategic models, a way you can capture assumptions about your market, analyze the state of your business and plan for new opportunities ahead. Get started with a set of customizable templates or you can create your own. Defining strategic models can be especially helpful for new products, but they're also a great way for more mature organizations to validate and refine offerings over time.

Positioning is where you articulate the market problems your product solves and what makes it stand out from the competition. Again, you can choose from customizable templates or add your own.

Market

Market is where you build your personas and competitors.

With personas, you can create detailed profiles that represent the buyers or users of your product. Once you decide what data you want to capture, you can reorder the layout and add your own custom fields. Link persona profiles directly to features and you can share your insights with other cross-functional teams, such as sales and marketing.

Next, track your competitors and capture key information about them. Once you define your competitors, you can plot them on a matrix. You can also add your own product to see how it stacks up. The location of each competitor correlates to the competitor Threat Scorecard, which is part of the competitor profile.

Imperatives

Now that your view of the marketplace is established is time to define your imperatives. Imperatives consist of goals and initiatives. This is where you think more deeply about the major efforts required to achieve the vision you just laid out.

Goals are 12 to 18 month measurable objectives that you want to accomplish, such as increasing revenue by 30% in this fiscal year. Success metrics provide a specific measure for tracking your progress.

If goals are what you want to accomplish then initiatives with the high-level themes or work streams you plan to complete to make those goals a reality. Initiatives are the link between your strategy on what you're going to build.

Looking up through the workspace hierarchy, initiatives can be rolled up to parent line level initiatives and then up to company initiatives, creating that important red thread of strategy throughout your organization.

Looking downward in the workflow, initiatives help determine what releases need to be planned and what features should be prioritized.

Now that your strategy is defined, you can plan your releases and prioritize your features with confidence because you know your team is moving in the same direction towards what matters most. Update your strategy as customer needs and market conditions change. Add any view in the strategy section to an Aha! presentation we'll share it via PDF or image file.

If you need help, get in touch with our Customer Success team using the question mark can your account. Get started with a free 30-day trial to see what you can accomplish or reach out for an invite to join one of our live weekly demos.

Strategy is never optional. So get started building yours in our heart today.

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