Marketing teams use Aha! Roadmaps to set marketing strategy, prioritize the most impactful programs, and report on the results in a purpose-built workspace. Start by creating your workspace hierarchy, then connect your strategy to your planned work and track dependencies and manage risks along the way.
Use this article to tour a marketing workspace. We will walk through the demo workspace, called Fredwin Marketing (Demo). You can enable it in your own account, use this information to start building out your own marketing workspace.
All Aha! Roadmaps trials are fully functional — including the ability to set up integrations. This means that you can start adding your own workspaces, schedules, and activities at any time (even after starting with the demo organization). You can also import your data into Aha! Roadmaps if you have your plans in another tool.
Click any of the following links to skip ahead:
Add a demo marketing organization
Demo marketing organizations are available for paid and trial accounts by navigating to Settings ⚙️ → Account → Profile and scrolling down to the section Demo data. Click Add demo to add one of the example marketing organizations to your account.
We created Fredwin Cycling Marketing as a fictitious marketing organization in Aha! Roadmaps to help you get started. The example data is designed to give you an idea of how Aha! Roadmaps can be used to define activities, set strategy, and build visual marketing plans.
Once you become comfortable with Aha! Roadmaps by using the demo workspace or creating your own demo marketing workspace, you can easily delete all demo data and start managing your real marketing work with your team. To delete the demo workspace, navigate to Settings ⚙️ → Account → Workspaces and click the Delete button that appears to the right of the workspace.
Marketing workspace hierarchy
Once you have added a demo marketing line to your account, expand the workspace hierarchy dropdown in the upper left of your screen that says Fredwin Cycling Marketing. This shows a two-level hierarchy structured by marketing function. In this example, Fredwin Cycling Marketing is the overall marketing line with dedicated workspaces for product marketing, digital marketing, content marketing, and communications teams grouped within it.
You can add as many levels, marketing lines, and workspaces to your workspace hierarchy as you need. This allows you to structure your Aha! Roadmaps account to reflect the design of your organization.
The diagram below shows how records can be used in Aha! Roadmaps to create and visualize your plan. The arrows show how items are linked to one another.
Knowledge
Centralize product information — from meeting agendas to brainstorming sessions, a single customer call to an entire product development framework, the Knowledge menu brings all your documents together.
Use Documents to create the notes and whiteboards that spark ambitious ideas and track your team's progress towards success. Documents help you define team processes, train new members, collaborate in whiteboards, or any other use that comes to mind. Use the library of guided note and whiteboard templates to inspire creativity, drive consistency across teams, and establish a standard approach for documentation
Frameworks give you a central place to diagram the product development methodology that your organization uses — from setting strategy all the way through to launch. You can build your own framework, start with a scrum or SAFe® template, or even use The Aha! Framework.
Files are a repository of every file attached to a record across your Aha! account, so you can easily find them again.
Strategy
In the Strategy tab, you can capture your strategy for each level of the workspace hierarchy — beginning with your workspace and rolling all the way up to the company level. You should link your strategy to the work your team completes as well, so that every activity, schedule, or idea has a clear connection to your strategic vision and every person on your team can see that strategic connection.
You will find goals and initiatives already set in each of the functional workspaces. Goals and initiatives can be linked to each other and to specific epics and activities, which helps you visualize and reinforce your marketing strategy.
Strategy templates
Aha! Roadmaps includes many templates to build and visualize your strategy, including business models and positioning templates.
Marketing workspaces also have access to Creative briefs, a page unique to this workspace type. Strategy → Creative briefs.
Use creative briefs in Aha! Roadmaps to communicate important information, such as program objectives, target audiences, customer truths, key messages, and brand voice. You can link creative briefs to records throughout Aha! Roadmaps — including initiatives, epics, and activities — so they are readily available as your team produces creative assets.
Schedules
Your team's success often depends on your ability to prioritize your work, coordinate with other teams, and deliver on time. Schedules in Aha! Roadmaps help you do just that.
Example schedules are available in each marketing workspace. Each schedule uses the default template to show phases and milestones which is available on the Plans → Gantt page. You can set up your own schedule template with custom phases and milestones under Settings ⚙️ → Workspace → Schedule templates.
You can also view activities in a Calendar view which is available on the Plans → Calendar page. Calendars bring your deliverables and timelines together in an interactive display that helps you plan ahead. You can drag the sample activities from the right-hand drawer onto a specific date.
Ideas
Better ideas lead to innovation, and innovation leads to market leadership. Every organization wants better ideas, but it's tough to actually capture them in a manageable way.
Each marketing workspace includes a set of sample ideas. To make the Ideas section of the application visible in your account, you will need to update your navigation settings. You can do this using the pencil icon located on the menu bar. Once enabled, view ideas and their statuses on the Ideas → Overview page.
Click on an idea to view the details.
Give each idea an Aha! score to visualize the relative value for your customers and effort for your team on each request.
Promote the best ideas directly to your roadmap when you're ready to start working on the offering.
You can also create an ideas portal to capture ideas from colleagues, partners, and customers.
Activities
Activities represent the incremental units of technical and non-technical work that carry out your strategic goals and initiatives.
A wide range of marketing activities are included in the demo marketing workspace with links to goals and initiatives. Each activity is scored using the Aha! scorecard which helps you weigh business value against effort. Click on an activity to see its details.
Use parking lots to organize upcoming work that is planned but not yet scheduled. You can create new parking lots by expanding the parking lot drawer and clicking Add column.
Epics are used to group activities that share a common business objective. Each workspace also includes example epics. For example, in the digital marketing workspace, a group of related activities is assigned to an epic that will launch a lead scoring system.
To enable epics, go to Settings ⚙️ → Workspace → Configure. Once enabled, you can switch between viewing epics and activities on the Activities → Board page, and between epics and schedules on the Schedules → Gantt page.
Roadmaps
Visual roadmaps are one of the most powerful ways to communicate where your marketing projects are headed. Use them to showcase upcoming activities you plan on delivering, set expectations around campaign timelines, or ensure key stakeholders are apprised of your high-level initiatives.
Let's focus on the activities roadmap for this tour. Go to Roadmaps → Activities and make sure that Fredwin Marketing (Demo) is selected in the hierarchy dropdown. With this roadmap, you can build a detailed roadmap that highlights critical dates. Check which activities you want to highlight and uncheck the activities that you do not want to show.
Analytics
Analytics let you analyze your marketing data using highly customizable list tables, pivot tables, and charts. To get started quickly, navigate to Roadmaps → Library → Overview. You will find more than 75 example reports that we created to help you get up and running.
For example, select the Activities folder and choose List Table: Activity status. This will generate a report that lists the sample marketing activities in the selected workspace and their status.
Presentations
An Aha! Roadmaps presentation is an intuitive way to share your roadmaps, reports, and other information from Aha! Roadmaps with your audience via secure webpage or PDF — or, for a live audience, deliver it from your browser using Presentation mode. The information shared in your presentation is directly connected to the data in your account, making it painless to keep your audience informed as updates are made.
Support
After you have gone through the demo marketing workspace, it is time to add one of your own!
If you get stuck (or curious!) reach out to our Customer Success team. They are all Aha! Roadmaps experts and they respond quickly.