Capture All Your Product Ideas In One Place With Aha!
March 17, 2015

Capture All Your Product Ideas In One Place With Aha!

by Keith Brown

When we launched our idea management software it was the first time that ideation had been tightly integrated with product roadmap software. Many of you have shared with us how it has helped you bring customers, employees, and other stakeholders to the innovation table. It proved that our original vision for idea management made sense – if you give stakeholders a voice they will tell you what matters.

That’s why we are releasing an enhanced version of our idea management capabilities. We want to share a bit about how it is being improved and what’s changing. The big idea is that it will allow you to capture and prioritize more ideas faster. It will include: 1) support for multiple products in the same Idea portal and 2) multiple Idea portals associated with the same product.

Combining the ability to capture ideas from multiple sources and then prioritize them on a roadmap makes life easier for product teams everywhere. And this was the vision behind why we introduced idea management in the first place.

Many of you asked for the ability to have one corporate Idea portal for all of your products and allow idea submitters to choose which specific product their idea related to. This will now be supported.

It will also be possible to serve both external and internal stakeholders of the same product with multiple portals. For example, you could create a public submit-only portal for customers and a private portal for employees. You can have as many portals as you need per product.

The following are the new capabilities that will be delivered with this release and the changes to how you will manage them.

Ideas are now an account setting Creating and managing an Ideas portal will only be available to account administrators because there is no longer a one product to one portal relationship. The configuration will be found under the Account settings menu under Configure idea portals. This is an important change because it was previously a Product setting.

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Support for multiple products As mentioned, you will be able to create an Ideas portal with multiple products, or create multiple Ideas portals to support the same product. To create a portal with multiple products just select the box next to each product when you create the portal. To create multiple portals supporting the same products just select the same product each time you create a portal.

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Drop down product selector When a portal supports many products, idea submitters will be presented with a drop-down menu to select a product that relates to their new idea. After they select the appropriate product they will go to the submission form that is custom to that product to enter the name of the idea, details, and additional information like category and contact information.

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Ideas associated with products in Aha! You will continue to track and manage all of the ideas via the Aha! application — just like you do today. Ideas that are tied to products will automatically show up in the Ideas tab under the product they were associated with.

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The built-in idea management capabilities in Aha! allows you to centralize the capture of and prioritization of ideas from multiple products — ultimately shortening the innovation cycle for your entire product line. It’s also a great way to fully engage the people who matter most to you — those who use your technology or need to sell or support it.

The enhancements mentioned above will be live by the end of the week.

Signup for a free Aha! trial — be happy Idea management is available at no additional charge for all Aha! customers. If you are not already an Aha! customer, you may want to sign up for a free 30 day trial of Aha! now to see why over 50,000 users trust Aha! to set product strategy, create visual roadmaps, and prioritize releases and features.

Keith Brown

Keith Brown

Keith was a vice president of marketing at Aha! — the world’s #1 product development software.

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