Aha!

Puntos a favor

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.

Puntos en contra

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.

Puntos a favor

Philosophically, the software gently pushes you to validate decisions that are key to product management - why are you building this, who is it for, how is it helping you achieve strategic and tactical goals? With that in mind, it sets up the team to be critical in their choices, extremely important in the current market. You're not forced to use these features, but it helps with both top-down alignment and bottom-up justifications for expenditure.

From a feature perspective, the JIRA and Confluence integration work well for our purposes, the cascading templates help us ensure consistency in communication with Engineering across the product lines, an the Ideas portal is a great addition for internal and external feedback.

Puntos en contra

Additional data types for the extensible entities would be nice - lists of custom entities for one.

Puntos a favor

It really does have everything that our product managers could want. It's got advanced functionality and the integration with JIRA is second to none. It includes areas for strategy, vision, personas, an idea portal, user story mapping, and feature boards. It's literally got everything and presents the information in a pleasing way.

Puntos en contra

It's a bit cumbersome to set up and begin using so you have to do your research and watch a lot of videos in order to set yourself up to use the tool successfully. It is very feature-rich so it can be quite complex.

Puntos a favor

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

Puntos en contra

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.

Puntos a favor

Aha! is a complete end-to-end product management solution that has the capability to organize features using simple-to-complex org hierarchies while simultaneously promoting product management best practices. There were many areas in which Aha! outshined other tools: application stability, overall performance & speed, ease of use, (just the right amount of) flexibility in feature organization, and out-of-the-box intuitive planning structures (eg feature organization, release planning, roadmaps, idea management), and it's full set of field integrations with JIRA. While many of these sound like fundamental requirements for any product tool, I found a majority of the 9 or so tools I trialed to be significantly lacking in these areas. Aha! is more expensive than some of the other popular product tools out there but the cost is easily justified by their larger feature set that'll save teams time and money, along with providing a stable and consistent user experience. Also, Aha! was also one of the very few tools that supported the capture of ideas directly from mobile phones and enabled users to easily attach mobile screenshots to an Idea or Feature card.

Puntos en contra

Since AHA is a very robust, flexible app that can scale with a business, there's an initial learning curve (as is the case with any software that provides this level of flexibility). The up front time investment is worth it because once the application is set up, it's very easy for the team to understand, navigate and use!