Just Launched! — Link Your Strategic Goals and Initiatives to Product Releases

Aha! is perfect for organizations who need a strategy. And even better for companies who need to manage their strategy across a portfolio of products. No matter how many businesses, divisions or product lines you have, we make it easy to visualize and ensure that your strategy is aligned across the organization.

Aha! can help you set goals for your company and products. You can also create initiatives which allow you to specify the key work needed to achieve your goals.

And with today’s launch we are making it even easier for you to link your strategy through to your product roadmap. We have done this by giving you the ability to link releases to any strategic initiative within the product or product line that the release belongs to. This makes it easy to tie your overall strategy to your releases so that you can ensure that all work that is done will support your organization’s most important goals.

You can also roll your goals and initiatives up your product hierarchy to their parent goals and initiatives. Doing so connects your company level goals and initiatives all the way down to your product goals and initiatives.

Ready to get strategic? Here’s how it works in two easy steps.

Link releases to any goals and initiatives within the product family For organizations that have a multi-tier product structure (i.e., company, business unit, product), this new functionality allows releases to be linked to any initiative or goal in the product portfolio. This creates greater visibility into the impact of product level releases on the corporate strategy.

Ultimately, product releases work best when they align back to your high-level business strategy. So, by linking goals and initiatives to specific releases, you can weave the red thread of strategy throughout your roadmapping process.

This example shows the Language Translation Framework product release and how it can be linked to the corporate initiative of Expand internationally.

Roll goals and initiatives up the product hierarchy Goals and initiatives are the foundation of your strategy. They help make the incredible vision you have for your product a reality. And for teams with a deep product hierarchy and lots of products, they likely have goals and initiatives that relate back to a product, a product line, or even a corporate level that are a few groups away.

You now have the ability to roll goals and initiatives up to any level of your product hierarchy. For organizations that have a multi-tier product structure (i.e., company, business unit, product), this new feature allows initiatives and goals at the product level to be rolled up to company level initiatives and goals. This makes it easier to see how individual product decisions serve corporate strategy.

For example, you might have a corporate initiative to expand internationally and one underlying product team might be working to translate their product into Spanish. This example shows the product initiative to Launch Spanish site (on the left). You can roll this product initiative up to the corporate initiative of Expand internationally (on the right).

In addition to Initiatives, Goals can also be rolled up your product hierarchy to allow you to visualize and align strategy through your product portfolio.

This example shows how the goal to Grow 10x is linked to the corporate goal to Increase revenue by 2x.

Aligning and syncing strategy throughout the organization will provide clarity and transparency so that teams are working on what matters most.

But keeping alignment inside a complex organization is not always easy. That is why having clearly defined goals and initiatives for your releases is important. It will communicate the strategic importance and enable you to tell key stakeholders why your prioritization plan reflects the best strategy.

So, what are you waiting for? Get busy setting your strategy and linking it to the hard work that you are doing.

Sign up for a free Aha! trial — be happy Linking strategic goals and initiatives 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.