The 8 Best Product Roadmapping Software Updates of 2018
Do you already have 2019 on your mind? We certainly do at Aha! — our team is busy working on bold plans for the new year. But the holiday season is also the time to reflect. And when we look back on the work we did in 2018 (including delivering more than 3,000 features and product enhancements), we feel deep gratitude.
Big or small, each new feature that we launched this year had the same intention — to help make your life a little easier.
Of course, many of these were small improvements. But we also delivered new areas of functionality that made a big impact on the way you use Aha! to set strategy, build beautiful roadmaps, and share your product plans with the team.
How did we know what to give you this year? Well, we use Aha! to build Aha! — including our ideas portal. We are grateful for the suggestions you provide and we appreciate you telling us what matters most and why.
No doubt this past year kept you busy with your own product launches, so you might have missed some of these updates along the way. So, let’s look back at some of the gifts we delivered in 2018.
1. Aha! mobile This year, one of our biggest gifts was pocket-sized. We launched Aha! mobile, so you can take Aha! with you in the palm of your hand. And it is free to download — if you have not already tried out the app for iPhone® or Android™, do it today. You just need a trial or paid account to use it.
You can use Aha! mobile to view, edit, and add records from your phone.
2. Enhanced integrations If there is one thing product managers love, it is when their tools work together seamlessly. So, we always make integrations a top priority. Throughout the year, we improved how Aha! works with tools such as Jira, Rally, VSTS and TFS, GitHub, Trello and Asana — giving you the most powerful and flexible integrations between product management software and development systems and other applications that your team uses.
Built on our second-generation integrations framework, our enhanced integrations provide faster imports, custom options for linking fields, and automatic updates between systems.
3. A fresh new look for Aha! Some gifts are all about the experience. This is one of them. Earlier in the year, we unveiled a new look for the Aha! user interface. The fresh design provided consistent page layouts, icon-based controls, and an updated color scheme.
The fresh design delivered a consistent user experience throughout the Aha! application.
4. Better roadmap presentations This year, we set out to give you the presentation capabilities you always dreamed of. We created a new presentation editor that lets you insert custom slides and add text, shapes, and images. And to make the work go faster, we also created a way to add any view from Aha! directly to the slides.
Make your roadmap presentations look exactly the way you want.
5. Strategic planning models We learned just how much product managers love templates this year. So we added five new strategic models to our suite of planning templates: Lean Canvas, SWOT, Porter’s 5 Forces, Segment Profile, and 9 Ps Marketing Matrix. Use these templates to bring consistency to how your team visualizes where your company and product are headed.
Customize each model to create the look you want. You can also build your own strategic planning templates.
6. Dependency report The new dependency report tackled the gnarly job of managing complex relationships across products. Not the most glamorous gift — but an incredibly useful one. Why? Because it helps you visualize dependencies across multiple products and keep your launch plans on track.
See the dependencies that affect your product and how your work impacts other teams.
7. Positioning builder Better products come from teams that work closely together. We had this goal in mind when we launched the positioning builder. We wanted to bring product management and product marketing teams even closer — so you can distill where your product fits in the market, the problem it solves, and what makes it unique.
The positioning builder includes everything you need to position your product for success.
8. Trending ideas reports The secret of gift-giving is understanding what people say they want and what they actually need. These two new trending ideas reports help you do just that. Quickly analyze what customers are requesting the most by theme and recent votes — so you know what is on their wish list for next year.
Access the new trending ideas example reports from the Aha! reports dashboard.
Our goal in 2018 was to deliver joy and help you be happy at work — we plan to do even more of that in 2019.
The big gifts are always the most fun ones to unwrap. But many of our more subtle updates delivered joy throughout the year too. For example, you told us how much you appreciate the new “is blank” filter to quickly find missing product data, as well as the ability to make bulk changes to your roadmap data.
So please, keep the ideas and feedback coming.
Sign up for a free Aha! trial — be happy These features are 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 or join a live demo to see why more than 200,000 users trust Aha! to set product strategy, create visual roadmaps, and prioritize releases and features.
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