This is an example of a customer ideas portal available in Aha! Roadmaps and Aha! Ideas.
The result is a new or enhanced product continuously informed by meaningful customer needs. After all, when you understand what customers want, you can focus on defining and building new functionality that solves real-world problems. This ensures your product team builds a lovable product that satisfies customers and contributes to business growth.
Most product management teams today use purpose-built tools such as Aha! Ideas and Aha! Roadmaps to capture customer, colleague, or stakeholder feedback and requests in one place. This provides a unified approach for setting strategy, building roadmaps, and capturing ideas in one system and makes it easy to track ideas from concept to delivery. You can also automatically communicate the status of ideas to customers, keeping everyone informed of progress as it happens.
This guide will explore idea management software in depth. You should walk away with a solid understanding of what to look for and an overview of the essential software features — including advice from our own Aha! product team.
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Why is idea management software important?
Ideas can come from anywhere: customer conversations, support tickets, employee roundtables, product demos, and more. Managing all these insights about your product is a big part of your role as a product manager. Done well, this helps you connect to what customers need, keep the flow of feedback organized, and focus on efforts that will make the most impact.
Some product managers use a mix of spreadsheets, emails, presentations, or note-taking apps to store and manage product feedback. But this gets overwhelming fast. When ideas are scattered, it is difficult to keep track of everything and prioritize which ideas will add the most value. Not to mention keeping customers up to date on progress — a time-consuming task if the entire process is manual.
Idea management software facilitates product feedback, organization, and evaluation in one central location. You can use it to establish a clear idea management process, helping you make sense of the feedback you receive and act on the best ideas quickly. By investing in robust idea management software, product managers can:
Streamline the collection of ideas from a wide range of sources
Facilitate internal collaboration among cross-functional teams
Prioritize ideas based on criteria such as feasibility, impact, and strategic alignment
Be transparent about which ideas are planned and which will not be implemented
Reduce the time spent on manual tracking and updates
Most importantly, idea management software helps product managers encourage a culture of communication. It provides the infrastructure for open dialogue, empowering customers and internal teams to share big ideas or acute pain points. This exchange helps product managers deeply understand their customers and helps customers build trust in the product.
