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Status Future consideration
Categories Product
Created by Guest
Created on Mar 5, 2019

Aha! data model support for actual features / components / themes, rather merely work output

Currently the "features" and "master features" relate to work output, not actual product concepts that users care about.

tl;dr; please give us more ways to separate concepts from the actual work. Features should technically be conceptual, and should be linkable to work, but Aha! forces you into work-oriented representations of features with its current data model.

 

There was an attempt to answer this problem with "master features" (see https://big.ideas.aha.io/ideas/APP-I-605), however, it just created yet another larger work bucket item. The problem is that all of the Aha! data model goes from product/vision directly into date oriented concepts, with no room for conceptual things like features or components.

 

Currently, the workaround to all of this is to create a custom field and populate that with the values of the features/components that should live in your product. However, there are two issues with that:

  1. it isn't a top-level Aha data model, so it doesn't show up in the navigation pane, and doesn't have things like pre-built reporting templates/roadmaps associated with it -- everything must be custom
  2. You have to create multiple custom fields across features and component, but because the data are not synchronized across custom fields (e.g. two tag-like fields called "feature theme" would have the same values in both, but they would not refer to the same thing -- they'd just have the same names.

 

Example: my product is a "phone" app on android, one of the features is call history, here's what I'd like to see in the aha data model

 

  • Product: Phone
    • Feature Theme: Call History (no due date, is eternal).
      • Master Feature: Call History List - due Q1
        • Feature: list layout, scrolling 
        • Feature: inbound vs outbound
        • Feature: caller name
        • Feature: caller number
      • Master Feature: Call History Panel - due Q2
        • Feature: tiles layout, scrolling
        • Feature: caller photo 

 

Without the call history feature theme, it's difficult to understand things like "what are all of master-features and features that relate to the actual logical feature: call history. Yes, you could ask me to create tags or custom fields around this, but then again the problem remains that Aha! doesn't give me good ways to visualize and understand my roadmap in terms of features by collection except by MORE custom pivots, etc. 

 

Another alternative solution is to allow us to create and report on relations to features. E.g. v2 relates to v1 and everything in anchored or linked to the next version. This might be more complicated but I'm open to ideas here. Hope this makes sense.

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