Aha! Review

I will use this software for the rest of my career. It's worth every penny.

If you've used developer-centric tools (Jira, for example), you know that they may be great for tracking stories and sprints, but they have very limited support (if any) for tracking the actual thought process in coming up with those stories. Either they don't have enough levels of hierarchy, or they try to get away with tags for everything. This is the first product that I've every used that has a structured methodology and design approach to evaluating your goals as a company / department; figuring out what initiatives support those goals; further breaking the initiatives down into master features (sometimes called Epics in other packages), and then individual features (stories). It also generates beautiful roadmaps, and has a transformational scorecard feature that lets you set up the criteria that matter, then rate all of your features, then calculate a score so you have a definitive order in which to do things.

Pros

The comprehensiveness of this software is incredible. It has almost everything you can possibly conceive of when building nearly any type of product or service. It helps you organize, plan, communicate, rate, rank, document, and create everything you need, except the actual software code (but you can just assign the stories to your dev team, and/or sync to another product). It also empowers you to have the conversations with stakeholders to figure out truly what's important (as opposed to the endless chorus of "it's all important"). I wish I would have known about this years ago.

Cons

The single largest missing feature is OKR support. There are goals and metrics, but not a structured way to do OKRs for products/teams. But there is also plenty of other software in the world that does it. We did struggle a bit with the integration with Jira, but that's largely because of Jira deficiencies.

So glad to have finally found and settled on Aha! Quite aptly named!

This is one of the slickest, most beautiful, well-thought-out, powerful, and extensible tools I've ever seen. It took a while to get all settled into exactly how it fits in with my needs, but the documentation AND customer support were second-to-none during the trial to help me get there. Once I did...wow, it's slick and powerful.

Pros

I loved so many things about Aha!, but probably the most important thing was my ability to manage and prioritize a LOT of my product's features that can also be tied to Epics, Storys, Initiatives, and Goals in a very slick and powerful interface.

Cons

The product becomes cost-prohibitive, especially for startups, if you wish to use the "Develop" side of the product as well as the "Roadmap" side. For some reason, you need to step up to an extremely expensive Enterprise version, which makes little sense as smaller companies would of course want to use sprint planning and many other critical lower-level engineering and development features. The trials only allow one or the other, not both (without a very confusing experience), which seems odd for the same reason.

Don't recommend. Read review for details..

Would never recommend.

Pros

Cool logo. Good space to house personas and competitor analysis.

Cons

In the initial onboarding process I would contact customer support for clarity, seeing as how I've never used such a software. I had one phone call, fairly short. I was later tasked with sole responsibility for the software - evangelizing and coaching others on how to use it. When I reached out to support for more clarity, the reps did EVERY possible not to get on a call with me. They would email me back every other day - directing me to instructional videos - refusing to get on the phone. I needed to integrate with Jira, "Please HELP!!??"- guess what? "We have some videos that can help you. Awful support. As well, not very user friendly, not customizable, and just down right inferior cosmetically.

Full featured, as deep as you need it to be

Pros

There is so much here. It is made my product managers for product managers. And as product management has so many variations in practice, this tool is configurable to suit pretty much all practices, processes and workflows.

Cons

The ability to customize is initially overwhelming, and its difficult to make sure all things are considered before configuring for deployment. Theres simply too much to learn. There are also certain things like workspace prefixes that once set and used, cannot be changed. So don't make any mistakes when configuring!