For early product planning, you need a place to draft goals, gather input, and create themes. The details will come later, but you need ideas to flow and visuals to illustrate your thinking. Virtual whiteboards are perfect for this — they provide a creative space where you can explore different approaches. This flexibility helps you determine strategy, timing, and the work required to release something new.
Let's illustrate this process by drafting plans for launching a beta test program. We will use two templates and Aha! shapes to convert early plans into actual work items.
Follow along and give it a try, or click any of the following links to skip ahead:
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Action |
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Create and edit whiteboards |
Contributor, or reviewers or guests who have Edit permissions for a whiteboard |
Insert templates into a whiteboard |
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Share whiteboards |
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Comment on whiteboards |
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Convert whiteboard shapes to Aha! records |
Conceptualize your plans
Beta test programs can help validate whether a release aligns with customer needs. Today, we want to formulate a launch plan for a beta test program to gather user feedback on a new autogenerated report. It will display users' workout history for Fredwin Cycling, our fictitious fitness tracking app. Let's start by brainstorming what work we need to complete for launch.
Navigate to Knowledge -> Documents to access your workspace documents. Then, click Add and select Use a template.
Find the Brainstorming session template and click Use template. A new whiteboard will open that contains the chosen template.
Customize the template's title and date. We will title ours "Beta test" to help define the goal.
We will work as a team for this exercise and invite two sharp collaborators to join us.
Click Share -> Copy link and select Edit from the menu of permission options.
Send collaborators the copied URL via email or chat channel.
Alternatively, you can invite collaborators who are not Aha! users via a general access link or guest invitation and customize their access permissions.
When the team joins our session, we can orient everyone to the goals, pose some idea-generating questions, and invite collaborators to add stickies that note what we need in order to be launch-ready. Some key brainstorming questions to consider are:
Why are we running this beta test program? What are the goals, and how will we know when we reach them?
What product functionality must be complete in order to launch?
What are the design or UX elements necessary for beta testers to use the functionality and share their reactions?
What logistics, agreements, or documentation should be ready for launch?
How should we share the beta test program's mechanics and expectations with testers?
How should we collect feedback?
During the session, we move individual stickies with ideas onto the board, add emojis to or vote on our favorites, and group related work into themes. In our case, we group ideas into the "Build functionality," "Launch beta portal," and "Onboard beta users" themes. These represent our releases. And the stickies we placed under those themes are placeholders for the features that belong to each release.High-five! The teamwork and feedback we used to logically arrange features into releases means we are aligned on early requirements. We now have what we need to start sketching a roadmap, and we can use the draft to gain high-level approval from our stakeholders. After that, we are able to formalize the roadmap and get to work in earnest.
Set up your timeline
Our brainstorming session gave us the pieces we needed to map our plans against a high-level timeline. We can do this within the same whiteboard on a new, clean canvas alongside our brainstorming notes. This keeps everything related to the project in one place.
Next to your brainstorming whiteboard, right-click and select Frame from the menu. Then, use the cursor to draw a new whiteboard frame.
Double-click the Frame text at the top to rename it. We will title ours "Early-stage roadmap for beta test program."
From the left-side whiteboard menu, click the Shapes icon.
Because we will use several shapes next, let's click the Pin icon at the top-right to keep this menu open. We can now add our timeline.
From the pinned Shapes menu, scroll to Advanced shapes -> Timeline. Then, use the cursor to draw a timeline across the top of the frame.
Click anywhere on the timeline to open the menu.
Update the timeline. We want to run the program through Q1 of 2025, so we select Custom and choose Jan. 1 as our start date and Mar. 31 as our end date.
Now the top bar reflects the three-month timeline we defined for getting the program started.
Plan your releases
It is time to create our first release. Once it receives approval, we can use the release (along with other releases we add) to help answer one of the most common product manager questions: "Are we on track?"
From the pinned Shapes menu, find the Aha! shapes section and select the Release shape type. Use the mouse to draw the release on the board. You can adjust its size at any time.
In your release shape, double-click on Release 1 and rename it. We will title this "Build functionality," which was the first release from our brainstorming session.
Group-select the stickies under "Build functionality" from the brainstorming board and drag them into the release box.
In the far left of the toolbar above your group-selected stickies, click the Sticky icon and choose the Aha! shape icon. This transforms the stickies into shapes that represent our features. For other projects, you can select a different type of Aha! shape (such as Idea, Requirement, or Epic) from the toolbar that appears.
Repeat this process to build the next two releases — in our case, "Launch beta portal" and "Onboard 10 beta users" — adding Aha! shapes for features the team will tackle in each release.
Move the release boxes and their contents, shifting them to align with early-stage concepts of when to start and end work.
Before moving on, let's validate our plans with teammates to keep everyone aligned.
Invite stakeholder feedback
To gather input on our roadmap draft, let's invite our collaborators back — along with other stakeholders. At this stage, we do not need formal stakeholder alignment and deep review, but we should get feedback and refinement to help direct the next phase of roadmap planning.
Click Share. Our two collaborators already have access to this whiteboard, but we want additional stakeholders (including our development lead and UX designer) to view and comment on the roadmap as well.
Select Guest, add email addresses, and set the access permissions to View and comment in the dropdown menu under Generate link.
Now, our stakeholders can access the whiteboard and add their feedback. We can update the roadmap based on their input and move on with confidence.
Convert plans into real work records
As soon as we finalize early-stage thinking, we can convert those plans into actual work records in our Aha! Roadmaps account. With feedback from stakeholders incorporated and plans set, it is time to get to work. With the Aha! shapes functionality, we can do this in just a few steps.
Group-select the three releases and their features. When you do, a menu appears at the top.
Click the Convert to Aha! records icon, which will open up the Convert Aha! shapes drawer.
Select the workspace where your releases will live (in our case, Fredwin Cycling). You can hover over the icon to the right of each feature and see exactly which release it will live in once you create the record.
Click Convert.
We group-selected everything, so each item from our whiteboard was pre-checked. You can always deselect any whiteboard shape that is not ready for conversion.
And just like that, we have three real releases pre-loaded with features. They are ready for you to add details such as overview, status, assignees, and more.
Get work underway
Just a few steps ago, we were drafting ideas on stickies and experimenting with loose concepts. We now have tangible pieces of an early-stage roadmap ready for deeper stakeholder review. With their input incorporated, we can formalize plans and begin to assign work, create and view dependencies, and set dates to track progress. We can do all of this directly on our whiteboard.
Double-click on records to open each one's drawer and layer in details.
Alternately, you can view and edit release and feature details in all the expected places within your Aha! Roadmaps account, such as your features board or Gantt chart.
If you get stuck, please reach out to our Customer Success team. Our team is made up entirely of product experts and responds fast.