You depend on your customers' feedback to build products they will love. And your ideas portal is full of great insights to help you understand what your customers need. But how do you find the ideas that will bring the most value to both your customers and your business?
In this article, we will explain how to identify ideas that are popular and align with your strategic vision — so you can prioritize and align on the most valuable work to implement next. Follow along and give it a try!
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Create or edit a prioritization list |
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Score ideas |
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Create reports |
Decide what kind of ideas to prioritize
Let's say we are on a product team and we have a clear product strategy for the next quarter. One of our biggest goals is to improve notification functionality within our mobile app. We also want to deliver improvements that customers are asking for so that they know we are listening to them. To capture feedback, we use a public ideas portal — where our customers select categories to submit their ideas.
Our ideas portal gets a lot of engagement, so we have a lot of product feedback to sort through. Since we do not have a set process for identifying and prioritizing the most valuable ideas, we are going to use the Prioritization page. That way we can filter for ideas that fit our strategy, determine which are the most valuable, and save and share our prioritized list to drive alignment.
Filter your ideas
First we will identify popular ideas that align with our strategic vision. We have chosen to add categories to our ideas portal to help manage what is submitted. Because one of our strategic goals directly relates to one of those categories, we will filter ideas by category, status, and number of votes. Then we will score each idea to determine which ones are the most valuable.
If you want to follow along in your Aha! Ideas account:
Navigate to Ideas -> Prioritization.
Click Create new report and confirm it is ok to clear the current list.
Note: If you were previously working on another prioritization view for ideas, click Save view before creating a new report so you can return to it later.Open the Filter Records menu.
Filter by Idea status and select Needs review.
Note: Needs review is the status assigned to new ideas by default. If you have a custom workflow, this may be a different status in your account. Account administrators can customize workflows and statuses in account settings.Filter by Categories and select the category that best aligns with your strategy. We will select Notifications as it supports our quarterly goal to improve notification functionality.
Note: You do not have to add categories to your ideas portal but they are useful. Categories and subcategories help you manage and organize submitted ideas.Filter by Number of votes and define the filter to include ideas with greater than 10 votes. This will help you find ideas that are popular with your customers.
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Move ideas to the right for prioritization.
Add data to your table
After filtering for the ideas we want to prioritize, we now have a table of popular ideas that align with our strategic goals. Each column displays helpful information about our ideas — but there is even more data available. You can edit your table to display any data you want to reference when scoring. Add a column for those fields to pull data into your table, then use it to inform your prioritization decisions.
For this example, we will add a column to display the total revenue from the companies who voted for each idea. We consider revenue in our prioritization decisions because it is a great way to tie in the financial realities of building our business. To do this, we use the Salesforce integration to populate the Revenue field for organizations. Then we insert this field as a table column so we can see how much revenue is contributed to our business from all the companies who voted for an idea.
Note: Organizations are offered as part of the Ideas Advanced plan. Please contact us if you would like a live demo or would like to try using this functionality in your account.
If you are following along:
Scroll to the right of the table and click the + Add button to add a column.
In the Edit columns window, add the Idea votes organization revenue field for the Idea record type.
Click Save.
Drag the Ideas votes organization revenue column next to your Product value column so you can see them side-by-side.
Note: You will not see currency symbols in the table. The values that appear are in whichever currency was used when they were entered into the Revenue field in Aha! software or via your Salesforce integration.
Score your ideas
Now that we have a filtered list of ideas and all the reference data we need, we want to estimate the value of each idea. We will use the product value scorecard in Aha! Ideas to evaluate each item. The product value scorecard gives you an objective way of measuring value throughout the product development lifecycle. Update scores frequently, and you can confidently prioritize work that will bring the most value with the least amount of effort. The product value scorecard metrics fit the needs of most product teams, but you can use a custom scorecard to factor in other metrics that matter to your business.
If you use Aha! Ideas with Aha! Roadmaps, product value scores will carry through with an idea even after you promote it to your product roadmap — so you can continue to use the product value scorecard for a consistent perspective as your work progresses.
The Prioritization view makes assigning scores to your ideas easy — we can score multiple ideas at once without leaving the Prioritization page.
Click >> to expand the product value score metrics.
Use the controls to adjust scores for your ideas. Reference the table's data columns or expand an idea's drawer view to see details that may impact scores.
Rank ideas by product value score
We have scored all of our ideas — now let's rank them. The easiest way to do this is to rank from the highest to lowest score. You can do this by sorting the Product value column.
If you have added other data columns to your table that do not impact your scores, but do impact your prioritization decisions, you may want to make adjustments to your rankings.
For this example, we want to understand the business impact behind our ideas and factor that into our prioritization decisions. So we will look at the Ideas votes organization revenue column alongside product value scores and reconsider each idea's rank.
If you want to follow along:
Look at each idea's product value score and revenue value together.
Note if any of your ideas with lower scores have significantly high revenue values.
Open an idea's drawer view and look at its Votes tab if you need to see which customers (organizations) have voted for an idea. Consider your business relationship with each of those customers and decide if you need to move any ideas to a different rank.
Drag and drop ideas into your desired rank.
Note: In the example below, the idea "Heatmap notifications" has a lower product value score than all other ideas. This is due to the effort it will take to implement. It also has fewer votes than other ideas. But the organizations who have voted on this idea provide significant revenue to our business, so we have made it a higher priority.
Add priority limits
We have a prioritized list of ideas. But that does not mean our team could tackle all of them. So let's add some priority limit lines to segment out our highest priorities.
Hover between the 10th and 11th ideas and click the Plus (+) button to add a priority limit line.
By default, our line is named Priority limit. Click the default name to rename it. Let's follow MoSCoW and name our first line Must have.
Hover between the 20th and 21st ideas and click the Plus (+) button to add a second priority limit line. Let's call this one Should have.
We now have two sections in our prioritized list (and could add more). If we discuss the list with our team and want to change the list, we can drag the lines to different places, or drag individual ideas above or below the lines.
Save and share your prioritized list
We now have a list of ideas that we feel confident will bring value to our customers and our organization, ranked in priority order. But we do not want to start working on our top priorities without being transparent and gaining buy-in from the rest of the team. So we will save our prioritized list as a report and share it so everyone is aligned on what we deliver next.
Click Save view.
Choose a workspace from the Share internally with dropdown. Other Aha! users who have access to the workspace you choose will be able to view your list.
Select a folder next to Save in. This is where you will be able to find your prioritization view later.
Next to Editing permissions, select if you want teammates to View only or be able to View and edit. For our view, we will select View and edit so our entire team can make adjustments as needed.
Click Save view.
Copy the report's URL and share it with your team.
Now that you have shared your prioritization view with your team, you can align on your top priorities and make any necessary adjustments to scores and rankings. Then you can get to work implementing your most impactful product ideas and delivering more value.