We want to provide some relief from endless hours spent arguing over the "most essential" items your team should work on next. You may call them features, activities, or user stories — they are the fundamental unit of work that your team tackles, and regardless of your role, you need to prioritize them to produce meaningful work.
In the past, product managers used spreadsheets to try to solve this problem. But spreadsheets are tough to use across a team, provide poor visibility, and are not tied to the feature and requirement details.
Using the Aha! Roadmaps scorecard will allow you to rank features against your strategy. Scorecards allow you to quantify the value of the work your team needs to accomplish and rank the records accordingly.
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Permissions
Actions |
User permission level |
Create custom scorecards |
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Apply scorecards to workspaces |
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Change the score on individual records |
The product value score
Product managers need a consistent way to estimate the value of their work throughout the entire product development lifecycle — from first idea to final production build. To do this, you can apply the same scorecard to multiple record types like ideas and features, so that at every stage in the lifecycle you are using the same metrics to estimate, track, and update your work's score.
The default scorecard equation in your Aha! account uses the product value score, developed with value-based product development in mind. Each scorecard metric covers an aspect of work estimation that most product teams need to consider:
Population: How many customers will this item impact?
Need: How important is it for those who require it?
Strategy: How closely connected is this work to your company and product strategy?
Effort: How much work will it take to build?
Confidence: What is your level of confidence in each score above?
These metrics combine into a scorecard equation that weights each of the first four metrics equally, and applies a confidence multiplier, like this:
( 1.0 * Population + 1.0 * Need + 1.0 * Strategy - 1.0 * Effort ) * Confidence
If you ever want to weight certain metrics more heavily than others, you could easily change the default 1.0 to 2.0 (and so forth) in the equation.
As your work progresses, you can (and should) update its score. You may have low confidence in an idea's score — but know enough to promote it to your roadmap or link to it from a record's Research tab. By the time you are ready to send a prioritized backlog to an engineering team, you may have a much better sense of a record's strategic alignment. Refer to a record's product value score whenever you need to prioritize it against other items, or communicate its value to another team.
Create your scorecard
Every Aha! account includes a default scorecard based on the product value score. Each workspace in your workspace hierarchy can have a unique scorecard comprised of metrics that reflect your strategy but make sense at a feature level. You can fully customize the metrics, scale, weighting, and complexity used to add quantification to your features.
You may consider using one scorecard for all of your workspaces to compare features across the portfolio — but that's up to you.
If you change a workspace's designated scorecard, all previous scores will be lost. Before you do this, we recommend that you create a list report and export all scorecard values for records in your workspace.
To create your own scorecard, navigate to Settings ⚙️→ Account → Scorecards, then click Add scorecard.
Name: Your scorecard will be named My Score by default. Name it something unique so that you can pick it out of a list of all other scorecards available in your account.
Description: Add or attach any relevant details.
Equation type: Select whether you would like to create a simple or advanced scorecard equation. If this is your first scorecard, we suggest starting simple and building to complexity. You can always edit a scorecard after you have created it.
Total score: If you're using a simple equation, click the number beside any of your metrics to change the way that metric is weighted. If you're using an advanced equation, use this text box to write your equation.
Add metric: Click this button to create a new metric. You can choose to create either a clickable bar or a slider. Your new metric will appear at the bottom of your metrics list. If you are on the Enterprise+ plan, you can add an automated metric that is based on field on your Aha! records.
Metric name: Name your metric something that will communicate to anyone who uses your scorecard. Hover over the metric name to see two buttons that will allow you to rearrange or delete the metric.
Edit: Click this to edit an individual scorecard metric. From the Edit configuration modal, you can change the Sequence type, Value range, Step value (how many values one step of the metric slider will move), and Units. Click Save to save your changes.
Use the Preview box on the right to test your formula while creating your scorecard. If you shift the metric values around and don't think that the total score accurately reflects the feature value as you intended, then keep working. This ensures that the scorecard is effective before you apply it to a feature layout.
Because the scorecards impact your entire account, you must be an administrator to set them up. However, once they are set up, owners can select which one to use for their workspace. Then both owners and contributors can update the scores.
You can create scorecards under Settings ⚙️→ Account → Scorecards.
You can clone a scorecard in Settings ⚙️→ Account → Scorecards by hovering over an existing scorecard and clicking the Clone button that appears on the right side.
You can select a feature scorecard for your workspace under Settings ⚙️→ Workspace → Configure → Scorecard for features.
Each feature can only have one score. So if you want multiple people to weigh in, it's best to have a live collaborative session or request they provide comments for each feature.
Change scorecard formula values
The best way to change formula metrics on a scorecard is to modify an existing scorecard rather than create a new one to replace it. This preserves all of the existing data and recalculates the total based on the revised formula (with the new criteria set to 0).
If you do decide to create a new scorecard, note that historical metrics from the original scorecard will be DELETED. To avoid removing all your existing scores, create a list report of all records with scores in your workspace, export those scores to a CSV file, then reimport those score values to the existing records using your new scorecard metrics.
Automate scorecard metrics (Enterprise+)
Automated scorecard metrics use fields already in your custom layouts to calculate scorecard values. As your team updates fields, corresponding scorecard values will update as well. You can automate metrics based solely on a field's value or set automation rules to define possible values based on text fields. With automated metrics, product value scores will always be based on the most current data.
To automate your scorecard metrics, navigate to Navigate to Settings ⚙️ -> Account -> scorecards. You will need to be an administrator with customization permissions to do this. Add a new scorecard metric and select Create automated metric. Then enter a name for your metric, select the record type and field you want to reference, and choose whether you want to use the field value or set rules to determine the value that will populate the metric. Last, delete any existing metric you want to replace and ensure your metric is included in your scorecard's equation.
Prioritize features
Once you create and implement your scorecard, you are rewarded with a more objective way to prioritize features. Just click the product value score number on a feature. You can edit the values of your various metrics by moving slider metrics, clicking bar metrics, or by typing a valid value directly into the box beside each metric.
The product value score is now the leading indicator of feature priority. Drag features to new rank order on the Features → Board view.
Features can also be reranked in a release automatically by score or other criteria shown below. To rank a release by score, just click on the More options button in the upper-right corner of the release column in the Features → Board and select Score.
If you are ready to customize your scorecard further, try advanced scorecard equations.
Filter by scorecard metrics
Sometimes the highest-scoring feature is not the one your team needs to address next. It could be that your team has some capacity at the end of the week and you want to find low-effort features to tackle quickly. Or maybe you want to see features with high impact on a metric, like customer satisfaction, regardless of effort. In these cases, you should filter your list report by scorecard metric, not by total score.
Navigate to Features → List to pull up a list of your features. Filter the list to show a subset of your features (you may want to look at features still in parking lots or features with a particular tag), then add filters or data columns for each of your scorecard metrics.
This report can get as sophisticated as you need it to. Click Edit filters to add advanced filters, or hover over the filters bar at the top of the page and click the Add filter + icon to add basic filters.
In the Add filters + and Edit data modals, you will have the option to add the metrics for any scorecard in use in your account. So it is helpful to know ahead of time which scorecard applies to your features in your workspace.
To do this, navigate to Settings ⚙️→ Workspace → Configure → Scorecard for features. If you see a custom scorecard there, note its name, then search for that scorecard in the Add filter + and Edit data modals — each scorecard metric will append the scorecard name. If you see the default scorecard there, search for the Aha! default product value score in the Add filter + and Edit data modals.
If filtering by these values, click the filter dropdown and select from the numerical filter options to show values that are a range, a comparison, blank, or not blank. You can apply multiple filters at once — for example, you may want to filter for features with very low effort and greater-than-average value.
Visualize feature scores
You can analyze feature scores with list reports and pivot tables, but two Aha! views are best suited to help you visualize your priorities at key points during the product development lifecycle.
The features prioritization page gives you a single view to score and rank features in your backlog, then align stakeholders around your development priorities (and even send those priorities over integrations to engineering teams).
The product value report shows you a summary of the value delivered at every stage of your product development journey so you can focus on delivering what customers truly care about.