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Aha! Roadmaps | Run a successful Aha! trial

Everyone wants to know why their work matters — and everyone appreciates a brilliant plan that makes them feel like a hero. If Aha! Roadmaps meets your needs, then you are getting started with a tool that helps you accomplish ambitious goals and feel great doing it.

Your 30-day trial is fully functional, including all the capabilities your team needs to set strategy, prioritize work, and build beautiful roadmaps. You can also integrate with more than 30 tools.

This article will help you explore all that Aha! Roadmaps has to offer and evaluate whether it is right for your team. You can find week-by-week suggestions to follow during your trial below or pick your own path.

If you prefer hands-on guidance, our Customer Success team is available to guide you through your trial — from configuring your account to creating a specific roadmap or report. We are all former product managers with expert knowledge of our software, and we would love to better understand your goals and set you up for success. So let us know how we can assist.

Click any of the following links to skip ahead:

First day

First week

Second week

Third week

First month

First day

Set up your environment

Configure your trial for success. You do not need to import your entire backlog or configure every custom field you might need (unless you want to). Instead, try a lightweight setup — just enough for a proof of concept. We recommend exploring the Fredwin Cycling demo workspace, which includes sample data so you can see what is possible.

Where to go

What to do

Best practices

Account settings

Settings ⚙️ Account

These settings apply to your entire Aha! account — though you can choose which settings you want to apply to individual workspaces.

  • Open the account-level workspace settings. You created a workspace when you started your trial. Think about how you might want to map your company's product offerings to your Aha! workspace hierarchy.

Think intentionally about how you want to define workspaces in your Aha! account.

It may not be as simple as one workspace per product component. In fact, it is often better to create workspaces based on the value you deliver to your customers.

Explore a demo workspace

Quick start guide

We created Fredwin Cycling as a demo company, full of data you can use to trial Aha! Roadmaps.

  • Open the quick start guide at the top of your page and click Tour demo workspace to try out Fredwin Cycling in your account.

Click through the top level navigation in Fredwin Cycling to get a sense for how you might structure your own workspace.

Congratulations! You have completed your first day. Do you have any questions? Reach out to our Product Success team or join a live product demo.

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Document product strategy

Successful products start with solid strategy, so many people begin their trials here. We recommend that you focus on goals and initiatives — the strategic imperatives that your team's work will link to.

Where to go

What to do

Strategy

Strategy Goals

Strategy Initiatives

  • Create four goals and chart them against each other. To do this, click the Change view type dropdown in the top left corner of the goals page and select Chart. Remember, you can rename the axes on the chart.

  • Create four initiatives and chart them against each other. To do this, click the Change view type dropdown in the top left corner of the initiatives page and select Chart.

  • Open an initiative and click on the Related tab. From here, add some releases, epics, or features to create those records and link them to your initiative.

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First week

Invite your team

Bring the team together to explore your trial, define workflows, and have a bit of fun. You can collaborate with each other in real time or explore on your own asynchronously, then come back together to share your thoughts.

Where to go

What to do

Best practices

Add user

Plus + button in the upper right of your screen -> User

  • Invite users one at a time (you can bulk invite more later!). Choose an optional email invite, or just add the person to your account.

Consider giving users administrator permissions so they can fully experience the trial.

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Ship a release

Start simple. In the first week of your trial we recommend using all the default settings to begin — and complete! — a release. Take notes of areas you want to customize, solutions that need to get more sophisticated, and any questions you have about best practices.

Our Knowledge Base and Product Success team can answer almost anything. For now, just focus on the flow of Aha! Roadmaps.

Features board with feature drawer in Aha!

Where to go

What to do

Features board

Features Board

First, we need to create and populate a release. Releases are containers for work oriented around a specific date.

From the features board:

  • Click Add release to create your first release.

  • The Fredwin Cycling features board comes stocked with features across multiple parking lots. Choose some of these or create your own, and drag them into your new release.

  • Adjust feature details. Try to link every feature to an initiative — so you can track how your work affects your strategy.

Prioritization page

Features Prioritization

Next, we need to prioritize the work. From the prioritization page you can give features an objective product value score, and sort them into a custom priority order. This way, everyone on your team can focus on the most valuable work at all times.

From the prioritization page:

  • Adjust the product value score of several features in your release.

  • Click and drag to stack rank features into a custom prioritization order.

Features board

Features Board

Let's get to work! Take the features in your release through the default workflow. You can involve your team here if you want a more accurate trial.

From the features board:

  • Open a feature and Assign it to yourself (or a teammate).

  • Click the Status button to move your feature to In progress.

  • Pretend this feature is real work your team has committed to. What would you do next? You can break down the feature into requirements, start conversations in comments, or assign to-dos.

  • As you work on the feature, move it through its Status workflow. Repeat this for each feature in the release.

Gantt chart

Releases Gantt

Finally, let's visualize the release in a Gantt chart. From here, you can adjust dates and details, and add critical dependencies to check whether you are on track to meet your release date.

From the Gantt chart:

  • Hover over a feature, then click and drag the circle to create a dependency between two features.

  • Drag features left and right to adjust their Start and Due dates. Notice how the dependency line turns red when there is a conflict.

  • When all features are complete, click the release's Name, then click the Status button to ship it.

Congratulations! You have completed your first week. Do you have any questions? Reach out to our Product Success team or join a live product demo.

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Second week

Capture key feedback

Feedback fuels innovation. You can use ideas portals to centralize product feedback, engage with a community of committed users, and analyze idea trends to find where you can deliver the most value. And when you do discover a great idea, you can promote it straight to your roadmap (and automatically update everyone who subscribed to the idea).

Let's start simple again. Create a public portal, then practice reviewing and prioritizing ideas. If you get curious, go deeper! Aha! Roadmaps includes comprehensive idea management functionality.

Where to go

What to do

Ideas

Ideas Overview

  • Create an ideas portal. Start with a public ideas portal to see how you might collect feedback from end users.

  • Add a new idea, then work through the steps you might take to review and prioritize it.

  • Promote your idea to a feature on your roadmap.

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Collaborate with cross-functional teams

Share strategic priorities — and get progress updates back. Aha! Roadmaps comes with more than 30 integrations. Many of them are built for real-time, bidirectional updates and robust custom field mapping.

Where to go

What to do

Integrations

Settings ⚙️ Account

Settings ⚙️ Workspace

  • If you work with development teams, be sure to trial the Aha! Roadmaps integration with their tool of choice.

  • Establish integrations with any other tools your team relies on.

  • (Optional) Send a release and its features over to your development tool.

Congratulations! You have completed your second week. Do you have any questions? Reach out to our Product Success team or join a live product demo.

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Third week

Analyze your progress

Data tells a story. Use analytics to uncover trends, highlight insights, and hone your curiosity. Need to make any changes to your data? Click into a record, adjust it, and move back to the report. The report will always reflect the most recent data available.

Where to go

What to do

Analytics

Roadmaps Overview

  • From the Overview page, click Example reports in the top left corner, then choose from any one of over 75 example reports. For starters, click the Features folder, then select List table: Feature status.

  • From the list report, click the Change view type dropdown in the top left corner to Pivot your list report. You now see the same data organized differently.

  • From the pivot table, click the Change view type dropdown again to Chart your data.

You can always create your own reports based on the data you have imported or the demo workspace you have enabled.

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Visualize plans

Create beautiful visualizations of your plan to achieve your strategic vision. The roadmaps included in Aha! Roadmaps can be as sophisticated — or as simple — as you need them to be.

This video shows how to create roadmaps for your team using Aha! product roadmap software.

Where to go

What to do

Roadmaps

Roadmaps Starter

Roadmaps Overview

  • Create a Starter roadmap. This roadmap is deceptively simple: drag records onto the roadmap to create them or to adjust dates and dependencies. When you do, you actually create these records in your Aha! account, ready to be assigned and implemented.

  • Choose one of the example Strategy roadmaps from the Overview page. Start with the Strategic roadmap by status. This shows you all of your strategic initiatives and their current workflow status. Click and drag to create dependencies between initiatives, or Save your view to share it with stakeholders.

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Explore advanced functionality

If your team is large or your workflows are complex, you may benefit from the Enterprise+ plan. We designed this plan to help you manage intricate cross-functional strategy across a vast number of dependencies.

Please contact Product Success if you are interested in Enterprise+ functionality.

Team capacity report in Aha! Roadmaps.

The Enterprise+ plan includes features such as:

  • Team capacity planning: Set team-based estimates and visualize each team’s workload on the capacity report, whether your teams work sequentially or on multiple items at once. This functionality gives you a way to configure planning scenarios, estimate work, plan ahead (using cost, hours, people, or story points), and identify and resolve resourcing issues.

  • Custom tables: Extend the Aha! Roadmaps data model and truly design how you manage important information with custom tables. You gain the ability to store and report on related custom data elements unique to your organization.

  • Automation rules: Create rules to streamline processes — so you can spend more time moving your big plans forward. Automate your product value scorecard metrics to keep your score up to date and based on the latest data.

  • And more

The Enterprise+ plan also includes concierge support. This is our highest level of service, including custom onboarding plans, dedicated relationships with leaders on our Product Success team, and ongoing check-ins to optimize your use of Aha! Roadmaps.

Congratulations! You have completed your third week. Do you have any questions? Reach out to our Product Success team or join a live product demo.

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First month

Make a decision

You have explored Aha! Roadmaps and brought in Product Success to address any questions. Time to choose if Aha! Roadmaps is the right tool for your team.

If you choose to move forward, you can keep your trial data or start over:

If this is not the right time to adopt Aha! Roadmaps:

  • You now have a clear picture of the tool that your team needs and the functionality that is most important to you.

  • You can always contact us with questions. We do not have salespeople here — just product experts who respond quickly.

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Suite overview
Aha! Roadmaps
    Overview
      Knowledge
      Account management
      Integrations
      Aha! Ideas
      Aha! Whiteboards
      Aha! Develop
      Release notes