Just Launched! — Reuse Competitors and Personas Across Your Product Portfolio
December 21, 2016

Just Launched! — Reuse Competitors and Personas Across Your Product Portfolio

by Jessica Groff

Wow, the holidays really snuck up on me. Thank goodness for online shopping and overnight shipping. After my rushed gift-buying experience, one of my resolutions for the new year is to be more organized. If I can think ahead, I can be more efficient with my actions. Sound familiar?

I know I am not alone — getting organized is a common goal for many product teams as well. That is why so many of us try to do key work once and reuse it when possible. But this takes foresight and upfront planning to make sure that what we create can be leveraged.

Thankfully, we have a gift for product managers this week to help. You can now create competitors and personas at the product line level, and access them from all child products. Create once and reuse — that is the idea with this release. This allows you to more effectively create and keep up-to-date customer profiles and competitors across your product portfolio.

We know that sometimes the same competitor or persona is applicable across many products in your portfolio. Now as you make updates to that competitor or persona in one product, changes will be visible across all products in the portfolio. This keeps the whole team current on what is happening in the market around you and ensures that there is one single source of truth.

Here are several ways you can put this new capability to good use:

Set competitors on product lines Competitors are often unique from product to product. But sometimes, another company competes against more than one of your products or even an entire product line. When that happens, you can now create competitors once at the product line and reuse them across all products within that product line.

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To add competitors at the product line, select the product line in the navigation Strategy Overview Competitors Add competitor.

View inherited competitors across all products When competitors are set at the product line, all child products inherit those competitors. For example, in the image below, the competitors set at the company level (Fredwin Software) are now inherited by the child product (Fredwin Cycling). Inherited records can be accessed from the new Inherited section of the Competitors and Personas screens. All users with product permissions can view inherited competitors and personas.

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Save time by adding competitors to the product line, and all child products will inherit those competitors.

Apply edits universally Inherited competitors and personas can be viewed, edited, and shared. This means that when an existing persona is further refined or a competitor changes course, updates can be made once — and the entire team always has the latest data.

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Define personas to better understand how your product serves different types of buyers, users, and influencers.

Share updates with your team Competitor and persona information is valuable for any product team. But other teams can benefit from it as well. Easily export that newly-defined user persona to a PDF to share with marketing. Or add competitors to an Aha! web notebook and send the URL over to the sales team for easy viewing.

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Take nearly any view in Aha! and publish it as a Notebook via a secure web page or share as a PDF or PNG.

We know a key to kicking off a successful new year is to start with organized, up-to-date information on your customers, market, and competition. And when you take the time to get it right, you should be able to use it throughout your product portfolio. 

That is why Aha! makes it easy to manage all your product information in a single place. With these new capabilities, you can define personas and competitors once and reuse the information as needed. And that is a gift that keeps on giving the whole year round!

Sign up for a free Aha! trial — be happy Inherited competitors and personas are available to 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.

Jessica Groff

Jessica Groff

Jessica was a product marketing manager at Aha! — the world’s #1 product development software.

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