Aha! A Few Quirks in my Favorite Product Management Software
I consider myself an early technology adopter. I’m obssessed with sites like Product Hunt that showcase new stuff and I visit many times a day for FOMO on the latest and greatest products. It’s not that I have to be first, rather, I’m interested in things that make my life easier and make me happy. Be it the latest life hacks, note apps, weather apps (I’m still a sucker for a good one), organizational apps, social apps…the list is endless. I love products.
It’s almost been one year since I started using Aha! for managing product and I couldn’t be happier with the decision, but it’s not without its quirks. More on that later. Before Aha! I tried several other software packages aimed at helping make managing product, better. None hooked me, none belonged intrinsically, and because of that they quickly became dusty.
The key to adding a product to your life is that it has to solve a meaningful problem. It has to gel into your process into become something you can’t do without. In product management, that means it has to fit seamlessly into existing processes. Or those processes need to change. When you have a team behind you, changing process isn’t easy, especially, when most of it just works.
I’ve trialed a few (product management) products that only added incremental value because they didn’t play nice with existing tools. That’s key. For instance, I tried products that did collaboration and task management well, and even Pinterest style boards for organization — and more. Missing, was true integration with all the other tools that the development teams use to do their jobs.
For example, my development team uses Pivotal Tracker for implementation process. As a product manager, Pivotal Tracker is pretty useless to me. Organization? Yeah right. It’s a mess. But there’s Aha! integration with just about anything, and take your pick. You want it, they probably got it. For my team, it was important to integrate with Pivotal Tracker and Aha! does that well.
Here’s roughly how my team works, high level:
There’s some conceptualizing and preparing design mockups up front and then collaboration with design & development — then the story gets planned. When design, development and I are happy, a story moves into a sprint. When the sprint is complete, the result is something tangible and shippable.
I needed a tool that allowed me to get into the weeds but also ascend into the clouds, to look down and see progress. I use Aha! to manage the strategy and roadmap for my products. I also use it as an idea bank for for customers to submit their own ideas about the products that I manage. It’s brilliant. Those ideas can turn into features (and notifiy the submitter), a collection of features can form a release, and many releases can be planned — and now we have a roadmap. Pretty slick!
Allthewhile — I get the in-the-clouds view when I want to see the status of a release in an excellent Kanban view like this one below.
The beauty of the view above is that it’s live. As stories move throughout Pivotal Tracker, they automatically move around this board. At any point in time, I can pop into Aha! to view the status of a release, including each feature and where it’s at in the pipeline. This view is priceless. No one ever has an excuse for not knowing the status of a feature or a release!
Aha! is great, but it has one major quirk.
I love Aha!. I do. I couldn’t do my job without it, well I could but, just not as headache and pain free. The one problem that I have with Aha! is that it’s too locked down. Maybe “quirk” isn’t the right word either.
In the enterprise plan of Aha! you pay for “Product Owners” and “Contributors” and you get unlimited (free)“Viewers” and “Reviewers.” I don’t use Viewers.
($1200/year/product owner or contributor)
Reviewers can see everything but all they can do is comment on features. That’s it. That’s a big gap in my opinion. That’s my beef.
It prevents my team from being as productive as they could otherwise be. With a team that has 4–6 designers (split time) that are adding mockups they need a bit more control and I’m not asking for much. And economically, it doesn’t make sense to pay $1200/year/each just to be able to change a couple statuses. Bear with me. Aha!’s licensing doesn’t allow the team to do tasks unequated with managing the product or roadmap.
Here’s a diagram that shows how my design team approaches new features. It’s very much iterative and it’s very much collaborative.
See the “Comments” section in the screenshot below? That’s from Aha!. In Aha! all that collaboration is done in the story. It’s fantastic! No complaints there. Paste a link, upload an asset, upload screenshots, collaborate, collaborate, collaborate—all in the comments section.
Here’s what’s bad, er, the beef. See the “status” section below? Only the Product Owner/Contributor license can change that value. See the “Actions” button? Only the Product Owner/Contributor license can change that value. That, limits productivity. Again, the only part editable by a Reviewer is, adding comments. That’s it.
Why does it limit productivity?
Let’s take a real scenario. Keep in mind that: The Product Owner is the only person that can modify the feature. Reviewers can only comment in the story (see comments section above)
When a feature is created, its default status is “Under Consideration.” When a designer starts to work on a feature, I (the Product Owner) have to open the feature story and manually set its Status to “In Design.”
The designer should be able to change the status to “In Design” to assume ownership of the feature and to show the entire team that that story is “In Design.”
A designer ought to be able to modify more parts of the feature. Likewise when design is done with the feature, they’ve collaborated with development, they’ve iterated on it and the Product Owner (me) signs off. That designer ought to be able to upload final assets and change the feature status to “Ready to Develop.” That is a signal to the Product Owner that the feature is ready to go, plan it in a sprint.
But Aha! has a workaround, so they claim, albeit, a clunky one.
Remember the comments section? Imagine that there are 50 comments consisting of the team collaborating on the feature. After a designer uploads final assets, then the Product Owner can come in a star the asset (see screenshot above). Super efficient…not.
Starring the asset ties that image to main body of work. When the feature is ready to be pushed to Pivotal Tracker, starred assets will accompany the story on that journey. But it’s just another thing that the Product Owner has to do — or remember to do — and would be much better served if others on the team could add assets.
Solution
Budgets are tight everywhere, money doesn’t grow on trees. I cannot justify spending $1200 x (4 or 6) just to give designers the ability to change a feature, attach an image to a feature, or change a status on a feature. Give (or charge a nominal fee) designers the ability to modify the feature and change a feature’s status.
Do you use Aha!? What do you think of it? Have you encoutered this issue with your team? What is your workaround?
ps: didn’t spend a whole lot of time writing this, proofed it once, so forgive any faux pas and typos.
