New Aha! Release — Better Emails, Search, Requirements, and Tasks
August 7, 2014

New Aha! Release — Better Emails, Search, Requirements, and Tasks

by Brian de Haaff

We rolled out a new release that makes life easier for product managers and their product teams. We were looking for a big theme for this release, but it’s best categorized by the collection of features that will help you be more productive managing the product on a day-to-day basis and collaborating with the team. I guess we could call it the “PM efficiency release” but that is not very sexy.

Maybe we should have called it “be a happy product manager and get more done.” Regardless of the title, it delivered a ton of enhancements that you should know about and may have even asked for. You may be interested in the summary Release Notes for all of the features that have been shipped. If you just want a few of the highlights and a couple of pretty pictures, keep reading.

Enhanced search Many of our customers are managing dozens of products and hundreds of features. And no matter how many you are managing now — as you use Aha! the numbers only increase. When they do and you need to quickly find that long-lost feature, search is your best friend. Search (the magnifying glass in the top right of the screen) has been enhanced to support filtering by product and record type (e.g. ideas, features, comments).

Assign Requirements Requirements can now be assigned to users by clicking on the user name in the requirement next to the action button. It makes sense because requirements often define a significant piece of work and the requirements in a feature might have different owners. In addition, we have enhanced how requirements and their owners can be reported on. Requirements and the requirements owners can now be shown on the Feature List view. Use the green control on the right to add the columns. Finally, the My Work screen also now includes requirements that have been assigned to users.

Task multiple people Have you ever wanted to assign one task to multiple folks? For example, you might want multiple members on your product team to provide feedback on your product roadmap or work together on a press calendar. In the past you needed to assign one task per person. You now can assign one task to multiple people and track when each person completes it. This makes it easy to manage the “meta” work that needs to happen to build your roadmap and launch product.

You can also see tasks that you have been assigned and tasks that you have assigned to others on the home screen. And it’s now easy to see who has completed the request and who still needs to get going.

Emails with history We have always done a good job allowing you to keep the team up-to-date via automated emails. These just got better. Emails that are sent in response to a comment in Aha! now include the entire history of the comment thread. This provides the entire history of the conversation and makes it easy to see what’s new in the context of what was already discussed.

There are a number of other great enhancements like the ability to bulk upload ideas. Go ahead and read the summary Release Notes that cover everything that recently shipped if you want to learn more.

Happy roadmapping.

If you are not already an Aha! customer, signup for a free trial of Aha! and see why the world’s leading product and engineering teams use Aha! to build software that matters.

Brian de Haaff

Brian de Haaff

Brian seeks business and wilderness adventure. He is the co-founder and CEO of Aha! — the world’s #1 product development software — and the author of the bestseller Lovability and The Startup Adventure newsletter. Brian writes and speaks about product and company growth and the journey of pursuing a meaningful life.

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