Just Launched! — Promote Big Customer Ideas to Your Strategic Roadmap

Your customers are a key source of great ideas. And they send them to you in all types of ways today. They come in emails, through sales, and even support.

The fact that you receive so many ideas through a multitude of channels makes it tough to keep track of all of them and even harder to integrate them into your roadmap planning.

We all need a centralized way to capture product feedback. That’s why Aha! makes it easy to create a fully-branded portal to capture feedback from your customers, colleagues, and partners. Set up as many portals as you need to customize the information that you want to gather. You can then review and prioritize the ideas that will have the biggest impact by converting them into features on your product roadmap.

However, every so often a new idea comes in that changes how you think about what you do or how you could change what you offer. Sometimes ideas from customers are bigger than just features. They can often become transformational concepts.

Because of this, we just launched the ability to promote ideas to strategic initiatives.

Initiatives allow you to specify key work that must be completed to achieve your goals. Think of these efforts as high-level projects that should be accomplished within a defined period of time — even if this is over a few months. They represent a major theme.

Here’s how this new capability works:

Capture customer and employee ideas First, create an ideas portal to bring customers and employees to the innovation table. Give them a voice to help you shape your product roadmap and reach your big strategic vision.

Use an ideas portal to allow your customers to submit, upvote, and comment on ideas.

Promote big ideas to initiatives When you come across an idea that has the potential to be a much larger business theme or initiative, promote it. Now you can capture big ideas and promote them to strategic initiatives on your roadmap. You can do this by selecting Promote to Initiative option under the Promote menu.

Quickly promote key concepts to initiatives when you are reviewing the idea.

As part of this launch we also added the ability to convert features to initiatives. Doing this allows you to address existing features that are multi-faceted and are better represented as a larger strategic initiative. This can be accessed through the Actions menu on features.

Track your strategic initiatives Track the progress of your strategic initiatives over time. As an initiative is worked on and completed, the idea that it came from and its status is automatically updated as well. This keeps everyone in sync, including the person who submitted the original idea.

Use the initiative drawer view to quickly update the status of your initiatives.

Build a strategic roadmap Finally, you can build a strategic roadmap using your initiatives. And because your idea management system is already linked to your roadmap, you can build this roadmap in minutes.

Proudly display your progress and show how your initiatives tie back to the larger goals of the business.

Tracking and prioritization of strategic initiatives is a key job for product managers, and your ideas portal is a central place for great ideas. Now you can easily connect the two together in product management harmony.

Sign up for a free Aha! trial — be happy The ability to promote ideas and features to initiatives is available to all Aha! customers. If you do not already have an ideas portal, you can learn how to create one here.

If you are not already an Aha! customer, you may want to sign up for a free 30 day trial now. See why over 50,000 users trust Aha! to set product strategy, create visual roadmaps, prioritize features, and capture ideas.