Better integrate Roadmaps and Develop

Here I'm representing Aha customers using both Develop and Roadmaps. I don't know whether anyone uses ONLY Develop, but it appears designed to be used standalone, if someone wants to do so. Unfortunately, my issues mainly stem from this decision by Aha! to draw a clear line between the products, as I think it makes them far harder to use for product managers who are using both products.

As a product manager, I don't want to have to context switch between strategy mode and execution mode. Work items should flow cleanly between the two. The introduction of the configurable cards for Develop brought this home to me and inspired me to submit this Idea.

While I'm really happy this capability finally exists, I was disappointed to learn that I couldn't just inherit a card layout for my Develop space like I can for all my Roadmaps workspaces--I need to define them separately for every page in Develop where cards are used. It could have been a 5 minute configuration, but instead took about 45 minutes.

Really, though, this is just an example of where the separation of the two products makes them harder to use together. Here are some other examples:

• Developer-created items only appear in the Teams workspaces. However, as a product manager I need to decide where these items fit on the roadmap, just as much as anything else I'm planning to build. They need to be assigned to a release, they need to be fleshed out, validated, designed, estimated, and perhaps they fall under an epic that's been created in Roadmaps, as well. These are phases my organization tracks in Roadmaps, not Develop. Segregating them and giving them their own parking lots and so forth adds a layer of unnecessary complexity. Every time I want to go look at everything else, I need to go to the workspace dropdown, open up the company workspace line, open up the parent workspace line, open up the actual workspace, compare everything...ugh.

• If I have a strategic workspace tied to a Develop/Teams workspace, basically everything that is ever created in Roadmaps needs to be assigned to the dev team eventually. Creating an artificial boundary where I have to explicitly assign things or they are invisible to the Team is a barrier to transparency, planning, and productivity. I know that Teams can potentially work on stuff from multiple Roadmaps workspaces, but right now there are just too many places where an individual work item can live.

When using both Roadmaps and Develop together, I would much rather just have the Roadmaps parking lots/releases act as the ONLY buckets of possible work that Develop can pull items from. Maybe some Roadmaps parking lots are designated for use by Develop Team members so they can manipulate them--I dunno.

The multi-layered workflow does seem to work okay--it makes sense that the strategic phase of "In development" has multiple sub-phases, all of which are executed within Develop. My main issue is that you have to go somewhere else entirely and everything loses its context, and in the case of Developer-created things, they cannot be put into the same context as all the strategic work easily enough to make it practical.