Product Tools — Aha

by Dominic Gadoury

In this new segment Product Tools, we will take a look at all the tools available to product managers and describe the pros and cons of each. Today we will begin with one of the newer and fastest growing products in the marketplace called “Aha”.

What is it? Aha! is a cloud-based project management solution for small, midsize and large enterprises. It caters to industries including education, energy, finance, government, legal, IT services, marketing, medical, non-profit and others. Primary features include task lists, product roadmaps, Kanban boards, collaboration and analytics.

The one thing that makes Aha unique is that instead of being a workflow tool focused on the Development organization, it is geared towards the management of end-customer value.

Some of the cons? Aha is a sophisticated tool that while flexible and configurable, it takes a little while to get fluent with everything it can do. That said, once you find your groove it gets much easier. The support team help with that though and very responsive and helpful. Pricing is also in the premium end of the market, particularly for smaller companies. Each product management account which allows edits costs around $135 a month. This does include numerous read and comment able accounts at no additional cost, however.

Finally, while a strong tool for Product Managers, it’s not focused on engineering tasks and stats. As such, integration with tools like Jira may be required. As such, I have setup the integration — and while it’s very flexible — there are some manual steps to manually send to Jira. Hoping they add the ability to automatically update on changes in both directions.

Have you tried Aha? What has your experience been on the pros and cons?