Just Launched! — The New Way to Manage Your Strategic Planning Process

Good teams set goals and initiatives. That is called strategy. And we all need our own plan. We just made it possible to align your own strategic planning process with how Aha! works. Whether you are in the process of discovering and drafting your goals and initiatives, or you are tracking the final plans and implementation, you can now manage the entire process in Aha!

We are excited about today’s launch. Because you can now apply your own best practices for your strategic planning process — and make it easier to collaborate with your team to define and manage your winning strategy.

This is done by leveraging the new custom statuses and workflows for goals and initiatives. Doing so allows you to set a framework for your team to work through, get goals and initiatives approved quickly, and monitor progress all in one unified strategy and roadmapping tool.

Strategic planning can be painful, but it does not have to be. You can use the framework that Aha! provides or customize your own process. And it’s even possible to do planning across multiple products across your organization. You can manage strategy for your entire product portfolio with support for different workflows by product.

Ready to get strategic? Here’s how it works.

Build and track the goal setting process The first step in strategic planning is setting measurable goals. How do you do that? Well, it takes work and an agreed upon process. Using the new custom workflows for goals, you can build your own custom statuses and colors to match your internal strategic planning processes. You can add custom statuses for the goal creation process with steps like: Gather market data, Estimate impact, and Final approval.

Set the framework for tracking initiatives Using custom initiative workflows, you can also keep the team on track and up-to-date as to how initiatives are progressing. Initiatives are the major areas of work required to meet your goals. Think of them as your themes that releases and features are linked to. By customizing initiative status names and colors, you can match internal reporting status terms like: At risk, and On track.

Above, an initiative page is shown with a custom workflow – showing the Completed status.

Configuration It’s easy to leverage the new strategic planning capabilities in Aha! You need to be an Aha! Admin to set this up under Settings. However, once custom workflows have been set up, Product Owners can select the ones they wish to use for their given product.

Start by creating your custom status under Account Settings - Configure status, workflows and feature types. Aha! is configured with a built-in, default workflow for goals and initiatives, but this new feature allows you to fully customize your own. When you click the + sign, you will get a copy to make it easier to create your own workflow.

Select Add Status to add a new goal or initiative status, or click on an existing status to edit it. Once you do, you can customize the status names, status colors, and transition buttons that will be seen on the goals or initiatives screen.

Using custom goal and initiative workflows, you can keep the team on track and up-to-date on key goals and initiatives. This allows you to guide your team through the planning process you already use internally, to set the path for your product strategy.

Aha! is designed to fit any product management or change management workflow. And it is now possible to align your own unique strategic planning process with how Aha! works.

Ultimately, this leads to better collaboration with your team. Happy strategic planning!

Sign up for a free Aha! trial — be happy Custom strategic planning is available to all Aha! customers. If you are not already an Aha! customer, you may want to sign up for a free 30 day trial now. See why over 30,000 users trust Aha! to set product strategy, create visual roadmaps, prioritize features, and capture ideas.