The activities in The Aha! Framework for product development
The Aha! Framework reflects the way our team approaches product development. It includes a series of discrete activities organized around the nine core stages of product development.
The Aha! Framework is a flexible approach to product development that can scale to teams of all sizes. You can benefit from our proven method by organizing your product development work around these activities. For teams who use Aha! Roadmaps, we provide a template for The Aha! Framework that you can leverage for maximum efficiency.
Each activity below includes a brief description and a link to relevant guides for further reading, video tutorials, and (where applicable) additional Aha! software templates you can use to accelerate your team's efforts. Even if your organization does not yet use Aha! software, you can reference the materials below and gain inspiration from the templates that you can incorporate into your team's workflow.
If you want to learn more about The Aha! Framework's activities within a specific stage of the product development process, feel free to jump ahead:
What is The Aha! Framework?
The Aha! Framework is based on our team's decades of experience developing products customers love — and supporting fellow product builders who rely on our product development software to do the same. The framework starts with prescribed biannual strategic alignment and supports continuous deployment through ongoing sprints.
Unlike other popular product development methodologies, The Aha! Framework does not include copious ceremonies or unnecessary complexity. Its activities are easy to understand and adapt to your organization's unique needs.
Although presented sequentially here, many of the activities (outside of setting strategy) repeat frequently and concurrently to support continuous deployment. The frequency for each activity is a suggestion for how often you should engage in that activity at a minimum. For example, a "weekly" activity might actually happen several times each week ad hoc as new information emerges and progress happens. Your timing will vary depending on what you are building and how frequently you deliver new customer experiences.
Stage 1: Strategize
Product success hinges on a vision and strategy. The first stage of any product development process is to establish what you want to achieve and the associated goals you need to reach in order to get there. Defining your product strategy is essential work that requires research and deep thought.
Map out your product's strategic vision so you can tie your work back to high-level goals.
The Aha! Framework prescribes strategic planning twice a year, which includes the following activities:
Define product vision
Frequency: Semiannually
Your product vision outlines the purpose and direction of what you are building. A clear, concise product vision helps the entire organization understand the larger purpose of the product and makes the future more tangible. Solidifying product positioning is also part of this activity.
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Review market conditions
Frequency: Semiannually
Market shifts can impact your company and product. Survey market conditions and take note of any meaningful movements — positive or negative. Use this information to update your business model, target personas, and competitor profiles. All of this will ultimately inform your product strategy.
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Draft product goals
Frequency: Semiannually
Company-level goals inform your product planning, so be sure that you have a clear understanding of company strategy before you draft product goals. Consider how product goals will both support company goals and help you achieve your product vision. The final objectives should be ambitious, measurable, and time bound.
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Identify key product initiatives
Frequency: Semiannually
What will you do to achieve your product goals? Think big picture — capture the major areas of investment or large bodies of work you will pursue. These are your product initiatives, which help you connect the team's work to high-level strategy.
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Gather feedback
Frequency: Semiannually
You want to ensure everyone is aligned on the "why" before you jump into the "how." Get input from the people who are invested in your product. Circulate your draft goals and initiatives with leadership and other stakeholders — and be sure to have open conversations and listen deeply (even if you do not agree with what they are saying). These folks will bring a unique perspective and might offer insights you have not yet considered.
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Set product strategy
Frequency: Semiannually
You know where you are going. So give the team the true north it needs to realize the product vision. Formalize product goals and initiatives, then share them with the team and explain how they support the product vision as well as overarching company goals. Make other strategy artifacts available (such as product positioning) to help everyone internalize the way forward.
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Stage 2: Capture
With product strategy in place, you are ready to collect feedback. Customers, colleagues, partners — lots of people will have ideas and opinions about what you should do next with your product. Welcome the inundation. You need to review and parse all of that feedback to discover the opportunities that will deliver the most value to your users. Feedback is easier to review consistently when you have an idea management tool (such as Aha! Ideas) that makes it possible to centralize feedback with an ideas portal.
Store the ideas you receive in one place with a dedicated ideas portal.
The capture stage of product development in The Aha! Framework includes the following activities:
Review customer feedback
Frequency: Weekly
Start with the most important people. Of course, you want to know what matters most to your customers. Make reviewing new ideas submitted to your ideas portal (or through other channels) a weekly part of your team's responsibilities. Organize ideas by theme to uncover areas where you can make the most impact.
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Review colleague feedback
Frequency: Weekly
Teammates bring different perspectives, so encourage colleagues to share their ideas with you regularly. You can create a private ideas portal to be sure those ideas do not get lost in emails or one-off conversations. Ask marketing, sales, support, and other relevant internal teams to provide feedback on what they think customers need most.
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Score ideas
Frequency: Weekly
What will bring the most value to customers and the business? We recommend a value-based approach. For example, you could score ideas based on the potential product value they would bring. The product value scorecard in Aha! software includes default metrics (such as strategic alignment, customer impact, and effort to develop). But you can update it to include whatever makes sense for your company and product.
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Promote ideas to features
Frequency: Weekly
Before you take any action on those ideas, you will want to review the best ones with stakeholders. Get their input to better understand priorities. Once you have a good sense of what will generate the most revenue and customer delight, you can quickly turn those ideas into features. Do not worry about implementation details yet — you will have plenty of time to refine potential features during the next stage and can prioritize them on your roadmap as part of stage four.
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Stage 3: Explore
Ideas rarely arrive fully formed. You want to expand what you know and venture into what is possible — so harness the power of visual thinking to explore different directions. The product team will further refine ideas during this stage, meaning a whiteboard really comes in handy here. This is also a good moment to begin mocking up how a new user experience might actually work.
A live brainstorming session in Aha! software
To most efficiently explore possibilities, The Aha! Framework includes the following activities:
Whiteboard new user experiences
Frequency: Weekly
Ideas transform into new user experiences. To best understand how that might happen, use a whiteboard to brainstorm and refine your thinking. Aha! Whiteboards offers a variety of templates and ensures teams can collaborate asynchronously. Because it is seamless to use with Aha! Roadmaps, you will not lose information as you move between ideation and planning.
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Create wireframes
Frequency: Weekly
Do not wait to wireframe possible solutions. Get everyone thinking about the desired solution. You want to do this early in the planning process so the team can think through what it will take to implement an idea before you commit to it fully.
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Gather feedback
Frequency: Weekly
Be sure to understand what others think to help validate your approach. Share those early concepts with relevant stakeholders to gather different perspectives.
Update wireframes
Frequency: Weekly
Stakeholder feedback (and other new learnings) will help you continue to refine your ideas. Update early wireframes with the information you think will improve the overall user experience and create the most value. Early wireframes are obviously not final — but they will help inform detailed designs once you get to implementation.
Stage 4: Plan
Product planning is a holistic concept. All of the upfront strategy and ideation will help you create a roadmap that is actionable and impactful. This stage is action-packed: It is now time to prioritize features, estimate value, and manage capacity. But you are not done with ideas. As you draft and update your roadmap, you will continue to refine what you want to implement based on your product goals, estimated product value, and practicality (based on available resources).
Organize features based on their priority. This is made easy with the prioritization matrix template and prioritization view in Aha! software.
Further developing your product plan using The Aha! Framework includes the following activities:
Draft roadmap
Frequency: Quarterly
You are ready to begin mapping out a high-level plan for what you will deliver. Create a prioritized list of the features you have already begun to vet. Pull those onto a draft version of your roadmap and organize potential work on a visual timeline. This view is helpful for thinking about what you want to deliver and in what order — as well as beginning to ponder dates.
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Scope features
Frequency: Weekly
Get clarity with an initial scope. Document each feature's essential information, and center your feature description around what the end user needs to accomplish. Along with your early wireframes, you can use this information to engage engineering. Work together to understand technical requirements (focus on the major points/avoid getting into implementation details) and put together an initial estimate.
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Score features
Frequency: Weekly
Now, you have a better understanding of what it will take to implement each feature. Update their product value scores to reflect the latest information. Once you score every feature, you can create a list ranking them from the highest to the lowest value to understand what should take priority.
Update draft roadmap
Frequency: Weekly
Your product plans are beginning to coalesce. You might need to adjust the sequencing, duration, and target delivery dates of the features you prioritized. This fine-tuning will continue each week as you gain new insights and make progress against what you have planned. As you refine your initial roadmap, start to define releases in parallel.
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Stage 5: Showcase
Now comes circulating your plans. The purpose of this stage is not merely to share the roadmap and communicate timelines and planned features. Instead, showcasing is an opportunity for you to solicit and answer questions — rallying support for your product plan. The goal is to gather feedback from relevant stakeholders so you can address and update your roadmap as needed.
You also want to get ahead of potential areas of confusion, so be sure everyone understands the product direction. This is the product team's moment to shine and showcase product expertise.
An example of a strategic roadmap created in Aha! software
The showcase stage of The Aha! Framework includes the following activities:
Share roadmap
Frequency: Monthly
Give folks a chance to review the roadmap. Remember: Stakeholders will benefit from understanding the strategic direction behind what you have planned. There are always trade-off decisions, so be sure to explain the "why" behind those choices ahead of time. Providing that context will encourage their support as you work toward finalizing your product plans.
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Gather feedback
Frequency: Monthly
Ensure everyone is aligned before you move forward. Encourage people to share their perspectives about your plans. Feedback is not to be feared here — you do not have to incorporate everything that everyone shares. Some points will be valid and easily integrated into your plan. Others might not. Use your product strategy as a guide for decision-making, because you must now hold true to that direction.
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Complete roadmap
Frequency: Monthly
Update your plans and make any final adjustments. For the feedback that you will not incorporate, be sure you can articulate the reasoning and how it relates to the overall strategic direction for your product before you recirculate the roadmap. To close the feedback loop, share the latest version with the individuals you solicited feedback from and preempt questions with the rationale behind your decisions. You will want to continually keep folks informed and share the latest version of your roadmap as progress happens.
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Stage 6: Build
The team is ready for action. Many product development teams take an agile-ish approach to work. (In other words, organizing and prioritizing the work with sprints). The Aha! Framework includes options for both one- and two-week sprints, but you can customize as needed to suit your organization's workflow. We go-to-market with new functionality at least once a week for the various products in our software suite — your cadence might be different. You can adjust the timing for each activity in the template just as you can with the other activities in The Aha! Framework.
A kanban board in Aha! Develop with work items in swimlanes
Agile development in The Aha! Framework includes the following activities:
Focus on high-priority features
Frequency: Weekly
You already have your list of features sorted by their product value scores. Now, you can give those features a bit more attention — simply update the feature definitions to include Minimum Lovable Product (MLP) requirements.
The concept of the MLP was first developed by Aha! co-founder and CEO Brian de Haaff in 2013. It directly counters the concept of a Minimum Viable Product, which focuses on delivering only what is necessary for customers to tolerate your product. The MLP puts the emphasis on delivering what customers will love (and not merely like).
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Complete designs
Frequency: Weekly
Back in the explore stage, you started with early wireframes to show how new functionality might work. You will now move toward high-fidelity designs that show how features will actually look and feel. This visual inspiration will guide the engineering team as it works toward delivering a new customer experience.
Further reading:
Gather feedback
Frequency: Weekly
Stakeholders and teammates who are invested in your product will be able to provide design input. But you should not exclude customers. If appropriate, this is a good time to engage users and source early feedback.
Update MLP requirements
Frequency: Weekly
Organize your learnings from the design review and choose what you will incorporate. When the requirements are ready for development, send the details to engineering so that it can begin bringing the new customer experience to life.
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Organize sprints
Frequency: Weekly or biweekly
Sprints are the way you group work that is ready for implementation. These time-bound units of work originated in agile methodologies such as scrum and are integral to product development in The Aha! Framework. A release usually contains multiple sprints, and sprints should happen in your engineering team's development tool. (If you prefer a kanban approach, that is workable as well.)
Further reading:
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Develop functionality
Frequency: Weekly
Bringing your MLP to life requires a deep partnership with the engineering team. You want to deliver the most value as quickly as possible. When you sync Aha! Roadmaps with your development tool, you can send releases and associated features over to that development tool and receive real-time updates as work progresses.
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Confirm built as designed
Frequency: Weekly
You are responsible for delivering what customers love. This means working with the core product team and ensuring what you have built meets your MLP requirements. Then, you can give the final sign-off.
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Ship functionality
Frequency: Weekly
Launch day is just around the corner. Depending on what you are delivering, you might choose to deploy the new customer experience to production for all users to engage with immediately or deploy it behind a feature flag. While the engineering team works its magic, be sure you are ready for the launch activities ahead.
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Communicate progress
Frequency: Weekly
Communication becomes even more important at this stage of product development. Everyone should be informed of progress against your roadmap. Err on the side of overcommunicating (weekly, if not daily). There should be no surprises — share any delivery risks that might impact dates for the launch work that other teams are working on now. If priorities changed during development, be sure that everyone who needs to know ... knows.
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Stage 7: Document
You know the old saying: If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? The same goes for delivering new customer experiences. Unless the broader cross-functional team knows about what you are delivering so that they can share the news, what you have built will not make an impact. As part of launch readiness (and ongoing support), you will want to gather all documentation in a central place. Then, create customized product resources for customers and colleagues.
Share documentation with customers and colleagues alike in a dedicated space (like this knowledge base!).
Documenting product resources as part of The Aha! Framework includes the following activities:
Update knowledge base
Frequency: Weekly
You should have an existing product knowledge base. (If you do not, create one today.) Then, update existing content or create new materials. Some examples of what you might publish include user guides, internal team FAQs, and best practices surrounding how to successfully support and use the new customer experience.
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Stage 8: Launch
Wahoo! All of that research, planning, and development work is finally coming to fruition, and you can announce the news to the world. Crafting a new customer experience involves more than shipping software. You want to translate the technical details into messages that resonate with the market and inspire your audience. Launch activities should drive awareness and encourage adoption of your product.
As part of our recent launch of Aha! Whiteboards and Aha! Knowledge, we took a more wide-ranging approach than our usual go-to-markets — including this blog post from our CEO and co-founder.
The launch stage of The Aha! Framework includes the following activities:
Set go-to-market activities
Frequency: Weekly
Let's prep for launch! First, you will want to organize a kickoff call with the cross-functional launch team to align on a go-live date and what go-to-market materials you need to produce. Before you meet, finalize positioning for the new customer experience — marketing teammates will need this to communicate the value of your new functionality to end users.
Further reading:
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Announce new functionality
Frequency: Weekly
Share the excitement and celebrate the new functionality. As part of your go-to-market strategy, the broader marketing team will have identified different channels for communicating the news to prospective and existing customers.
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Stage 9: Analyze
To fully understand the value of what you delivered, you must analyze and assess. You can track customer usage, feedback, and love (yes, love) to assess realized product value following the launch. Reporting on delivery metrics and monitoring ongoing product KPIs will help you understand how that value evolves over time. This stage is also when you should reflect on what went well during the process of delivering the new customer experience and what can be improved for next time.
Keep track of your most important performance metrics with tailored dashboard views.
Reporting and improving the overall process in The Aha! Framework includes the following activities:
Assess product value
Frequency: Weekly
Did you create the value you expected when you first began product planning? Product and feature adoption metrics can help you evaluate whether or not you achieved your product goals. Depending on what you delivered, you might also want to engage mechanisms for tracking customer sentiment (we call this "love"). Update the product value score and compare the actuals against the projection.
Further reading:
Improve overall process
Frequency: Weekly
Never stop improving. There is always an opportunity to keep raising the standard. You can engage teams at different levels to understand what went well and what could be improved for next time. Ask stakeholders if there are ways you could streamline reviews and feedback. Work with the core product team to understand where hiccups and hurdles happened. Everything you learn can help you make changes that boost efficiency for the next iteration.
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