Just Launched! — Visual Calendar Report for Product Marketing

Products get better fast when the teams that build them also use them every day. Of course, we use Aha! to set our own strategy and roadmaps. But we also use it for our marketing work — including this launch. And because marketing projects often have very specific deliverable dates, we needed a different way to see those activities. Aha! needed a calendar view.

Today we are excited to announce a new calendar report for product marketing teams. It is a helpful tool for visualizing and planning upcoming content, campaigns, and related tasks.

As superusers of Aha!, we used this new calendar report for a few weeks before launching it today. This gave us the opportunity to put our collective decades of product marketing experience to good use and improve it. The result is a lightweight calendar that leverages the robust Aha! data model. Although product teams will also appreciate that they can lay out features, releases, and To-dos in a calendar view, it is perfect for product marketing teams and the nature of work that we do.

You will find it under “Reports” in the main navigation. You will also want to turn capacity planning and time tracking on under Settings Product Configure for the product. Or create a custom date field to be able to easily assign dates to the work and plot them on the calendar. Here are a few ways you can start using it immediately:

Plan upcoming marketing activities There are two ways to start filling in your calendar report. You can view your planned upcoming marketing activities by adding dates to existing features. Or, you can create new features directly from the calendar by selecting the plus [+] sign on a date. The month-at-a-glance view makes it easy to organize product marketing activities around the dates they need to be delivered. And the features shown use the default thin card view from each product so you can see the high-level information you need.

Track tasks leading up to the launch The calendar report is not just limited to features. You can also show releases and To-dos. Create a calendar report to help with resourcing — show To-dos so that you can visualize tasks assigned to your cross-functional teams and track everything that needs to get done. Completed To-dos are marked in green, upcoming in gray, and overdue in red. And just like all Aha! reports, the calendar report can be filtered so you only see the information you care about.

You can also use the calendar report to view your upcoming work. Customize the view to show To-do due dates and set the task assignee filter to yourself.

Align product marketing efforts across the company Launching a new campaign or bringing a new product or feature to market is a big event. And it is important for the marketing teams across the company to be in sync. Use the calendar report to view marketing activities from multiple products. As you plan and coordinate your work, dates may need to shift. You can adjust dates on the calendar report with a simple drag and drop of the card.

Quickly build and customize calendar reports Create the perfect report by navigating to Reports Calendar. Select the settings icon (green gear on the right) to customize your view. Here, you can choose any date-based field to show on the calendar report (including custom fields) and choose whether to hide or show weekends. All Aha! users can view and create reports. You must be a Product Owner or Contributor to add new records or adjust dates. You can read more in this Support article.

If you do not have capacity planning enabled, feature due dates will not automatically appear. A date custom field can be added if you do not want to use capacity planning.

It may be a cliche, but necessity truly is the mother of invention. We knew that if our own team was wishing for this calendar report, your team likely was as well.

It was fun to give you a little inside look at how we do things at Aha! We want to give special thanks to our incredible engineering team who built this great new feature for us and for you. Give it a try and let us know what you think!

Sign up for a free Aha! trial — be happy This feature 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 of Aha! now to see why over 100,000 users trust Aha! to set product strategy, create visual roadmaps, and prioritize releases and features.