Aha! Builder tutorial | Product managers can now build software with an AI app builder

Stop waiting for engineering to create robust AI prototypes and applications. In this tutorial replay, see how Aha! Builder enables product managers to build full AI applications — no technical skills required. You bring the strategic vision and user insights. AI turns them into secure, scalable tools in minutes.

Editor's note: The video mentions the Aha! Builder early access program, which has closed. Aha! Builder is now generally available to try for free.

Transcript

Kathryn: Hello, everyone. It is Kathryn here from the product marketing team here at Aha!. Welcome to our live product event: Product managers can now build software. This is the first public demo of Aha! Builder, so we are super excited that you are here. First, I want to launch a poll and get your input on what would you like to be able to do with a PM coding tool like Aha! Builder. Maybe you want to design robust prototypes, create some new internal applications, launch tools that optimize how you work, or all of the above.

And then before we really dive into the demo, I just want to make sure that everybody is aware that Aha! Builder is currently accepting folks into our early access program. That concludes my logistics, so I want to introduce our two great presenters for today. First, we are so honored to have Brian de Haaff here with us. He is the co-founder and CEO of Aha! Brian is going to share how AI is really reshaping product management and why we believe that product managers are now in an amazing position to become true product builders.

And then we have James Harris with us as well who is the Lead Product Manager for Aha! Builder. He's going to take us into the product and show what this really looks like in practice, how teams can move from strategy and discovery to working tools so much faster, all while still meeting the needs of a larger organization.

So I'm going to quickly end the poll and share those results so that everyone can see. And with that, I'm going to hand it over to Brian to kick us off with our vision.

Brian: Awesome. Thanks, Kathryn, for the nice introduction. I realize in the poll that we worked on together, we didn't have in it, building applications for customers.

So if that's something you are interested in, you should leave a comment for us in the chat as well. We're interested in how many folks want to build applications for customers. It is an absolute pleasure to be with you today. I tell people all the time that, you know, the two most important things for all of us are our health and our time. And many, many of you have chosen to spend some time with us today, so we're very grateful for that and, really honored to have the opportunity to talk about what we're seeing as it relates to product management, the future of AI, and in particular, Aha! Builder.

If you, like many of you probably are, are younger, than I am, and you've thought to yourself for some time, I really wish I had been around when, this thing called the Internet was starting to take off, and it was starting to transform our lives and transform how we do business.

Well, we're at a new crossroads. Every 30 years or so, there is a monumental technological change or shift that I think impacts our lives in immeasurable ways, and we are there again. And so if the Internet gave us connection, I think AI gives us cognition, and now we can argue, and we can have a separate conversation about is it full cognition yet or is it not. I've qualified it by saying where it's giving us augmented cognition right now, but I think that's debatable, and, we will see over the next few years how far cognition if we get to full cognition or not.

How can AI help product managers across the product lifecycle?

The key from a product perspective is, like, what does it mean for all of us? What does it mean for how we build software going forward?

And so I kinda suggested that, I've been doing this for a long time. I didn't tell you exactly when I started, but the next slide starts to give that away a bit. So when I think about my own career journey, been building software for a really, really long time now. I'd say 24 of the last 26 years, I did it exactly in the same way with tiny nuances. So we have become more thoughtful, a bit more strategic answering the "why" first. 13 years ago, we're coming up on the 13th anniversary of starting Aha!

You know, we started the company based on what we called the why, the when, and the what — which was helping people move out of, at that time, really, Wikis and the Office Suite to start with a strategic goal orientation, what we called the red thread of strategy.

But that was still, you know, in the frameworks that we built, The Aha! Framework for building software, which we'll talk a little bit about, was still like we've been building software for the last 20 or 30 years.

I think most of us started realizing something different is happening in a major way, with ChatGPT in 2023.

Many companies like us start reacting really quickly, start embedding it into our products. You've probably done the same. And then we start thinking about it more holistically, really, in 2025.

And so 2025 for us, we take here, what we call the product development process. This is really The Aha! Framework that we put together that starts with that goal orientation and works its way through.

We took a hard look at the jobs that product people do, including us, through that lifecycle. And we brought forward in summer of last year, it's almost been a year now, a complete AI assistant. You may, if you're an Aha! customer, you may have noticed it is now branded as Elle. So we don't have to try to say the Aha! AI assistant anymore. We just refer to it as Elle, and Elle provides really great assistance across every step in that lifecycle and is now pervasive throughout the software.

What does Elle do? We're talking about today, all types of things. It helps you write, which is where we started. It helps you build designs in whiteboards. It can take ideas, all the feedback that you get through your ideas portals, and help you organize those into themes. Recently, we added the ability for it to help draft strategy for you. James gets a little prop here from an interview that we are doing it now with our Aha! Discovery product. It now can take transcripts and do full analysis, which is fundamental in a world that we can build faster than ever.

We still need to know what we are building. That actually will be the bottleneck. A CPO on a call I was just on last week said, I want to get my sprints down to a day. And I was like, well, you know, why a day?

A day is kind of arbitrary. You could get it down to a few minutes if you wanted to.

And then his question was all like, okay. Great. How? I'm like, well, it's completely gated by validations of what you want to build. And so knowing what to build is fundamental, and you'll see that as James jumps into the demo.

And then today, you might not know, but if you're an Aha! customer, you can do full lightweight prototyping with Elle. There is a dedicated prototyping agent. And so that's today.

That's kinda how we got to where we are, and everything we talk about is moving forward. 2026, wow. We thought we felt like we were on a treadmill the last few years. Right? It's been an exciting, fast-paced, and at times grinding few years that only feels like it's accelerated at the beginning of this year.

And for all of us, this community of folks responsible for building experiences that people love, ultimately, people pay for, that's how we get to do what we get to do. Everything now changes because we can now go all the way from discovery into delivery, and that is a fundamental shift.

People are tired of hearing me say it, but, you know, my undergrad degree is in philosophy. Nobody ever thought that I was going to be able to build actual applications and move them into production.

And now, that is the opportunity ahead of us.

What should product teams consider before building software with AI?

What doesn't change though, and so we have a bit of this contradiction. I touched a little bit on it is everything changes in terms of how we build product and what's possible, but nothing changes and that we still need to know what we want to build. And I think the realization that's starting to emerge in organizations, especially larger ones, is deep thought needs to go into who's building, what they're building, and how do you ensure that what gets built meets what I call the four S's.

So the first is it needs to be significant, needs to be worthy of building in the first place. The second is it needs to be secure. The third is it's gotta be able to scale in a business context. And the fourth is it has to be supported and supportable moving forward.

And I think with all this is — we start to emerge into a more settled state of what's possible for product and our ability to build really robust prototypes and applications ourselves. We'll start to come to the forefront as we apply best practices, ensure that our building meets our enterprise governance standards.

So with that, we have launched Aha! Builder. It has been a remarkable number of months for us. I think James and I collectively have, if you put it all together, have done over a hundred demos of it.

And, as Kathryn said, we do have a number of customers now using it in their early access program. If you want access to it, as she said, please leave a comment. It is invite-directed right now, meaning that, what we're looking for is people building really meaningful applications and people who are willing to spend a little bit of their precious time telling us about that experience so we can make it better. So Aha! Builder, before I hand it over to James, it's a bit of a sleight of hand here. I've got one last slide. What is it for? And so we saw this in a number of your questions that people submitted when you registered for this event.

What can product managers build with Aha! Builder?

It's really for three things or three outputs, probably a better way to say it. The first is it's for really robust prototypes. So these are prototypes that fully represent what you intend to build or a new experience. And that means that they have everything that you need built into them. They have a database built into them. You do not need to go to a third party and try to set up a database. They have authentication built into them. So you can have users who are not Aha! users, and that's key, log in and use the application.

The second is they're perfect for building internal business applications. And so we saw this in the poll. Many people want to build applications for product itself to work more effectively. But in our EAP, we're seeing wonderful examples of all types of other applications, applications to track price books, tariffs, fixed assets, marketing assets, like, you name it. James will share an example from a financial services company as well shortly.

And then I think the third is the one that we'll see move really quickly over time. Right now, it's hard to know how to cast it, but I think if you're talking about business and enterprise, it's when we think about applications for customers, I still think that the place to start is for simple tools, simple applications. It's not going to be replacing large scale revenue generating applications in the immediate term. If we're having this session a year from now, I bet we're having a slightly different conversation. But, that's where we see it today in terms of where the technology is and how quickly it's moving and all of the pieces that you need to integrate into an application to serve end customers.

With that, I have the pleasure of handing it over to James who has the harder task of demoing the actual product to you, and look forward to that. And then I'm going to be around and hang out. I'm sure there'll be questions. We'll pick those up at the very, very end.

Alright, James. All you.

James: Thanks, Brian. Really appreciate it and share your sentiment of thanks and appreciation for everybody that's out there. Thank you so much for your time.

Super, super prideful day, I think, for the Aha! Builder team. Really excited to showcase the power of the tool for you. Before I jump in, just a little bit of context.

We were working with a small commercial banking team here in the United States back in January, and their relationship management function was running voice of the customer surveys that fundamentally nobody was responding to. They were administering surveys via email manually and tracking these in a spreadsheet. I'm going to jump into what we built collaboratively with that customer before then taking you inside of Aha! Builder to show you exactly how the sausage was made, so to speak.

Welcome to SurveyEngage, aptly named, I think.

Here is the business application that was built again back in January.

Here you can see the relationship manager's view of the application. You can think of this almost as a mini CRM that is going to keep at the forefront for RMs at an individual company level where are we with respect to surveys that are being administered and sent and I can also keep myself accountable against an activity workflow that's been defined again customer by customer.

I'll now take you quickly into the executive dashboard. Here is where we can see summary level performance information for the program at large. At the top, I've got my snapshot.

I can edit and manipulate the data by individual RM in the spirit of driving accountability. I can look also at response rates by market and some general top level performance data that we as an executive team are interested in. I've also got survey completion progress over time. So pretty simple, but, you know, two important takeaways here before I show you how this was built.

One is notice that this is a standalone web application. So end users do not know that Aha! Builder or even Aha! the company is behind this.

This is very much deliberate and by design. We've already seen as part of the early access program, many customers building internal or external applications that they're exposing broadly without exposing directly.

The second takeaway here is how was it built? Time to build in general. So when I built this product, and I'll show you just how I did that in a moment, it took a whopping 15 minutes to build the SurveyEngage product. Of course, I've iterated a few times with the customer since then, but 15 minutes to get to a functional and scalable version one.

The takeaway there I think is you should think of Aha! Builder really as a tool that empowers the team to move from idea to usable application in a single working session.

Let's see how we built it. Welcome to Aha! Builder. Many EAP customers, if you're on, are familiar with this interface here.

Couple of callouts before I show you the getting started flow, and then we go behind the scenes with the SurveyEngage product. Each panel here is a discrete application that we have built with Aha! Builder against a real use case that customers have shared with us. At least from a permission standpoint, you should think of an app in Aha! Builder as an Aha! workspace. That's going to allow you to control who can build products, who can contribute to the development of different products, and generally just separate sensitive applications by function or business unit. In this new world, very, very important.

Let me take you now to the product dropdown. Many folks on the call, I'm sure, are existing Aha! users today. You've seen this before.

You can see Aha! Builder here very much a first-class citizen, our newest product in the portfolio. I bring this up because I think the relationship between Aha! Builder and Aha! Roadmaps is a really important one.

How is Aha! Builder different from vibe coding tools?

We are not big fans of the term vibe coding. Vibe coding, that term evokes emotion. And if you're trying to build something serious, be that a prototype or an application that you plan to scale, it's hard to do that emotionally. We have high conviction that you need to be strategy led and led with customer need, customer purpose. So at scale, or sorry, at launch, you're going to be able to pull in data from your Aha! Roadmaps account. Be that a feature, be that an epic, be it another data record that's important to the product that you are building and actually point Elle, our AI assistant, at those specifications to build in a really, really plan-ful way.,

How do you build an AI app with Aha! Builder?

Let's go behind the scenes with SurveyEngage, the product that I previewed for you briefly. This is the — I'm sorry. I missed the getting started flow. Let me first take you through the getting started flow. This is what every EAP customer and you will see when you join a trial of Aha! Builder. I'm not going to go through each discrete step in the getting started flow, but I will speak to each.

At the start, the AI assistant Elle is going to ask you to describe the application, provide a high level overview, speak to the vision.

I've built upwards of 15 applications at this point with Aha! Builder. You can go as broad or as deep and detailed here as you'd like.

In the next step, Elle is going to ask you some follow on clarifying questions to really refine its understanding of exactly what you want to build.

Elle is going to suggest to you a few names that are appropriate for the application you're building. You can name it whatever you'd like. It'll ask some details related to the user persona or the end user of the application that you're building. What are the core capabilities that you want to see and the foundation of a version one?

And at a high level, how should navigation work? So how should the various screens in the application be oriented? It'll also ask you for some information related to style, look, and feel. I'll talk more about that in just a moment.

Once you complete this workflow, Elle is going to generate in about one to two minutes a prototype, a front end UI prototype that you can review.

If you're happy with it, you can click the build my application button.

10 to 15 minutes later, you are going to have a working version one.

Let me come now into SurveyEngage and show you behind the scenes how things are enhanced, iterated on. Here's the prompt that I served back in January, Elle, as part of that getting started flow that we just saw. Here's the application that I want to build. And as I completed the steps in that flow, Elle's been able to tease out in detail what is the vision for the application, what are the goals for the application.

Maybe these are a bit more aggressive than if I would have defined them manually, but nonetheless very relevant to the product and also the user persona. So here's Sarah, my relationship manager that Elle has defined in detail.

When it comes to design, I'm going to come over here. Here's where you can see a preview of the SurveyEngage application we walked through together at the bottom.

Here's where you can overlay what I would call a veneer. So lightweight touches to look and feel across typography, color scheme. You can also customize your own palette here.

If you do have a global design system that the team is using and that's public, you can simply drop a link over here to Elle and ask Elle to refactor the front end of the application to make sure that it aligns with the look and feel of the products that are in production today or that your team are building.

We're also actively investing in the ability to more intimately connect Aha! Builder with the design system wherever that design system lives to make sure that as users or members of the company come into Builder, we're building products in a way that at the outset align with the look and feel.

How does Aha! Builder connect to Aha! Roadmaps?

I talked a little bit about the importance of the relationship between Aha! Builder and Aha! Roadmaps in the spirit of building plan-fully and strategically in this new world, this is where you can see that relationship really come to life. So at launch, you're going to be able to plug Aha! Builder into a workspace on the Aha! Roadmaps side and actually pull in a backlog of features that have been defined by the team, that are well thought out, that have been prioritized, and then you can open a feature. You can create a feature from scratch from within Aha! Builder or open an existing one, review the specifications in detail.

You can update these when you're happy and when you're ready, you can click this build feature button which is going to send Elle on its way to build that feature exactly to spec. And when the jobs are completed by Elle, you will see those updates and that new functionality rendered in the preview of the application that I'll showcase in just a moment.

For technical folks, unlike me and others with a degree in philosophy, you can come and look at the code base anytime you want.

So hypothetically, engineers can come in here, review the code, update the code, and see those updates rendered in real time again in the application preview.

The code is yours even though we are hosting the applications on your behalf which I'll talk more about in just a moment. The code and the IP and everything that you're building with Aha! Builder is yours and you can work with Elle to export, download the code, move that if you want to host it elsewhere.

The code is yours at a fundamental level and you're also free to take that code and leverage AI to translate that into the appropriate coding language.

One of the big pain points that I've experienced directly — I've done a lot of testing in this space in and outside of Aha! Builder. One of the big pain points I've found is rollbacks and version control. You know, if you're trying to vibe your way home and you spend two to three hours with an AI assistant, you can get stuck pretty easily. And we call that the cul-de-sac where the only direction is reversed. It's surprisingly difficult to roll back to an earlier version of the application that you are building.

This is where we've tried to address that pain point. So we're automatically going to save different versions of the application as you build and if you need to roll back, you can do so by clicking the roll back button here really easily.

One of my favorite features of Aha! Builder actually.

How do you manage AI app configuration, security, and privacy in Aha! Builder?

How do we configure access for individuals? This is where or for users I should say. This is where you're going to configure how users log into the application. So we can lock it down to only users that already have existing credentials. I can open it up to new users for sign up. We do support authentication through a variety of third party vendors that you could see listed here. You can just enable or disable the one that is relevant to you and the organization.

And we're also excited to go live in about three weeks or so with support for SAML as well.

The chances are that for any application that you're building, you're going to want to connect that application into third party systems for the purposes of reading and writing data, maybe pulling in data from disparate systems to visualize that in a central way. Here is where you can generate API keys and connection tokens that can be used in partnership with Elle to actually build connectors into other systems. So I'm leading our early access program.

We have onboarded north of 60 customers to this point. Lucky me. You can imagine the back and forth that that represents. I actually built an EAP manager application that I connected into my Google Calendar using the Google Calendar API so I can keep track of all the different meetings week over week that I'm responsible for. And I've also connected that application into the ideas portal that we are using to crowdsource feedback from early access customers around issues, bugs, feature enhancements, and so forth.

Every application that you build in Aha! Builder is database backed. So, each app has a SQL database behind it and we also support tracking events or logging events in server logs. So for the purposes of debugging, general observability, the team can come in and look at the logs.

The only other point I'll make related to deploying your application into production, you can do so really easily using this menu here and clicking the deploy button. Before you do that, you'll either need to elect to use a subdomain which of course will append this to the address for the web application in question or you can choose to use a custom domain or a CNAME if the organization owns one.

I'm going to come over to documents now.

I think in this exciting new world, the reality is to be really enterprise ready or production ready to building applications in this way is going to mandate serious consideration from a code security and a privacy standpoint. And this is where we've tried to get ahead of that. And so we've identified in a couple of different areas the commonplace standard code security and privacy policies requirements as you can see listed here. So imagine you are building something for a European audience.

I'm going to come over to data privacy. GDPR clearly comes into question. This is where you're going to be able to work with Elle to run or repeat a comprehensive assessment of the code and application at large against a set of requirements like GDPR. When that's done, you're going to be able to export, download and share the results of that assessment with the right stakeholder groups.

You can export and download this easily.

If your information security team does have a custom or a bespoke set of standards, policies, requirements, no problem. You can upload a PDF or a DOCX into the chat dialogue box here with Elle and ask Elle to run an assessment against said requirements. Elle will then generate a report that similarly you can export, download and distribute to the right stakeholder groups.

The last maybe most intoxicating aspect of building in this new world is coming over to the application preview. This is your traditional vibe coding interface even though we don't like that term where you can work collaboratively with Elle to iterate and enhance the application that you are building. So I'll show you a very simple example with SurveyEngage. I'm going to click this pointer to give Elle a little bit more context in and around where I want to update the application. And let's imagine the relationship management team at the customer we've been working with wants to start tracking NPS score. Let's add an NPS tab to the header of the application.

Now if I was still in building mode for the application we're looking at, I probably would have provided a lot more detail and color to the prompt that I shared with Elle. How do I want the NPS tab to behave? What data should the user see when they navigate to that screen? But for simplicity, we'll just ask Elle to add an NPS tab to the application.

And I think credit to our amazing engineering team. I think they've done a wonderful job of animating the work that Elle is doing in real time to convey to you where Elle is right in the context of the prompt that was provided. It's not just here's a prompt, black box, go away, get notified that the application has been updated. You can see Elle working here in real time.

That is what I had to show to the audience today. We're obviously very, very excited about Aha! Builder where it's been amazing to see the engagement from the early access cohort.

And with that, I think I'll hand it back to Kathryn for some Q&A.

Session Q&A

Kathryn: Yes. Thank you so much, James. You just walked us through such a thorough demo. That was really amazing to see all of that.

And thank you also, Brian, for sharing that inspiring vision behind Aha! Builder. We are going to open it up to Q&A in just a moment, so please keep adding all of your questions into the Q&A panel. It has been super active, so we'd love to get all of those questions in.

Before we get into Q&A, I just want to pop up another quick poll. We would love to get your input on your desired next steps with Aha! Builder. So if you would like to apply to the early access program, get a one on one demo with our team, be notified when the product is generally available, or maybe you're just here just exploring for now, please respond, and then we will follow-up with you accordingly after this.

So thank you for your responses to that.

And while I have that up, we can jump into some questions. So I'd love to hand the first one over to you, Brian. What makes Aha! Builder unique?

Brian: Well, kudos to James first. Thanks for going through that and doing it in a pretty timely fashion. So well done to you.

Yeah. I saw this come through in a bunch of the chats. Right? So many different tools now for building prototypes, building applications.

I think that will increase over time. And so as you look at the market and decide what do you want to start using, what do you want to try, I think the way to think about Aha! And Aha! Builder is there's kind of three, at least three considerations.

I think the first is the I'll give them to you in what I think are the most important order.

The first is it's integrated into a complete product development suite now. Right? And as we talked, knowing what to build is fundamental. It's only going to get more important. Right? We're going to see a rapid proliferation of software globally.

Knowing what to build that actually will create some value for somebody and ultimately, like we talked about earlier, that somebody will pay for is fundamental. It's what's going to lead to ultimate success. And so the fact we didn't show this that you can directly integrate these applications with our idea management capabilities.

And if you're working on a prototype, allow users to give you direct feedback right while they're working in your prototype that then comes back into your Ideas portal that then moves into features and ultimately back into the building environment is fundamental. James did touch on, I think, the other key place, which is if you're working on a major application and you already have a road map for it, you don't really want to have to type that information again into Builder. You want a seamless integration to be able to move that. And then there will be there are other key places too.

Strategic, you saw goals, personas, a lot of places where you need that deep integration between, what I would say, the planning, the understanding, the discovery, and ultimately what you want to build. I think the second is, and this is a little more subtle, but you start to see it, and it becomes more clear as you use a product. It's like everything is everything that you need is built in. And so the fact that it has a full database built into it, that it has authentication services built into it, it would be really annoying if every time you built an application, you had to build out a whole suite of authentication services just from the technology aspect of it, but also right, we're all going to start to become very aware of token usage and ensuring that a tool has what you need already built, that you don't have to spend time and money building.

It is important. And then I think the third is when we think about our own journey and where we've been successful, we've been successful helping meaningful businesses build really great products. And so I think you see in the demo from James that it's oriented around business. Like we say, it's built for business, and that includes what you can't see, which is even how we work with customers.

You know, we don't have sales teams. We don't have traditional support teams. We have all product managers working directly who are product experts. So I think, you know, those are the three areas that are the key to focus on as you think about Builder.

Kathryn: Yes. Definitely. And that's very well explained. I know there were quite a few questions that came in through Q&A on that.

To get into some more technical questions, over to you, James. How will users be accessing these applications, and do they need an Aha! license?

James: Great question. Thanks, Kathryn. I talked over support for authentication. So for every application that you will build in Aha! Builder, you're going to be able to work with Aha! to configure exactly how that application is accessed and by whom.

So no. Absolutely not. End users do not need an Aha! license to access the application that you're building. They will need an Aha! license to collaborate with you, building the actual application.

Kathryn: Yes. That makes sense.

And Brian just went over this, but I think this is an important point to reiterate. So to you, James, do you need to set up a database and authentication separately like you commonly do for some other tools?

James: No. No. I did voice over that as well. Every application that you build in Aha! Builder is going to automatically be backed by a database. It'll have a SQL database behind it. We are hosting the application on your behalf by default. But as I'd mentioned before, the code that you are generating, right, with the support from Elle is yours.

So at any point, there is still the ability to export, download that code, move it if you want to host it on your own infrastructure as well. There's that flexibility baked in.

Kathryn: Awesome.

We are just about at time. I know there are still quite a few questions in Q&A, but not to worry. We will be following up with you after this. We want to make sure that everybody's questions are answered.

So thank you again to Brian and James, and thank you to everybody for joining us today for this first public demo of Aha! Builder. And we do have registration open for our next event, which is going to be on April 23, all about how you can present your roadmap to executives with confidence. Visit our events page at any time for more details as well.

So thank you all again. That's all the time we have today. We really appreciate you guys spending part of your day with us, and we look forward to seeing what you will build. Thank you.