Aha! Roadmaps | How to pull work from Aha! Roadmaps into Aha! Develop

Engineering and product teams need to work closely together to build lovable products. But they work best in tools designed for their unique workflows. So we need a solution that allows developers and product managers to share records without compromising efficiency.

In this article, we will pull work from an Aha! Roadmaps workspace into our Aha! Develop backlog. You can follow these steps in your own Aha! account or modify them to fit your own needs. Give it a try!

Click any of the following links to skip ahead:

• Confirm user permissions

• Integrate Aha! Roadmaps and Aha! Develop

• Enable backlog management

• Pull work from an Aha! Roadmaps workspace

• Refine the record

Confirm user permissions

Top

Integrate Aha! Roadmaps and Aha! Develop

For this scenario, let's assume that we have a product team and an engineering team both using their respective Aha! products. The first step is to bring both products — Aha! Roadmaps and Aha! Develop — under one Aha! account. This is different than an integration with a third-party tool. There are no fields to map or integration updates to approve. Instead, both teams share the same records in a unified product development environment.

To merge multiple Aha! products into one Aha! account, first contact Aha! Product Success at support@aha.io.

Top

Enable backlog management

Our team is using sprints in this example, so work pulled in from Aha! Roadmaps will live in the backlog. But first we need to enable the backlog management page.

If you want to follow along:

• Navigate to Settings ⚙️ Team Configure Backlog management.

• Click the dropdown and select Enabled.

• Click Update workspace configuration.

Top

Pull work from an Aha! Roadmaps workspace

On the backlog management page, we can search through multiple Aha! Roadmaps workspaces and pull records from the workspace into our Aha! Develop backlog. When that happens the record does not actually leave the Aha! Roadmaps workspace — it exists in both places, shared between the two teams.

• The left sidebar shows options for pulling in work that has not been assigned to our team yet. We will use this in the next step.

• Product work shows all records that the product team in Aha! Roadmaps has assigned to us.

• Engineering work shows all records that we have created in our Aha! Develop team.

• The Prioritized backlog shows what we think our team should work on next — whether in a sprint or on the workflow board.

Now we are ready to pull in work for our backlog.

• Click Aha! Roadmaps on the left to expand the sidebar.

• Click the Workspace dropdown to select a workspace and choose Fredwin cycling.

• Analysis of personal race goals looks like a feature our team should take on. Drag it into the middle of the page to assign it to our Frontend team.

• Our newly assigned feature and its associated Aha! Roadmaps release now appears under Product work. Click on the feature to open it.

  • The assigned Aha! Develop Team is ours and the Team status is Not started.

  • The Aha! Roadmaps release is Premium plan updates, and the Workspace status is Ready for development.

Top

Refine the record

Now that our Aha! Develop team has committed to this feature, we need to refine it so it is ready for a developer to get started. We will break the feature down into manageable increments, estimate the effort required to complete them, and update any custom fields that are important to our team.

• Click on Analysis of personal race goals to open it.

• We need to break the feature into requirements to indicate different steps — and, in our team's case, different developers — who will tackle this feature. On the Requirements tab, click Add requirement. Let's add three requirements: Frontend, Backend, and QA.

• The current feature Estimate of 5d comes from the product team. Based on our engineering expertise, we can make this a little more accurate. On the feature, click More options, then under Estimates, Use requirements estimates. Our requirements' estimates will now roll up to the feature level.

Next let's refine each requirement.

• Click on Frontend to open it.

• We have a few fields in our Aha! Develop custom layout that are not available to the product team. Click Class of service and set the priority to Normal priority.

• You can even use the planning poker extension to collaboratively estimate with the team. Based on the results, update the Estimate field to 2d.

Now that each requirement is refined, we can prioritize them against other work our team has committed to. From the Product work backlog, drag each feature to the Prioritized backlog. From here, we will arrange the Prioritized backlog in execution order, taking into account priority, inter-record dependencies, due dates, and anything else important for our team.

Top