Initiative templates

PLEASE revisit! We are having to keep Initiative and Epic templates as fake Inits and Epics right now and it's cumbersome to manage.

+1,000.

I have a few hundred Product Managers and Program Managers I would like to keep aligned to a similar format. An Initiative requires alignment around the given objective, approach, solution, etc...

Ultimately, with Google Docs; we can save a template... prescribing a specific format and components to consider. All of which allows us to manage what needs to be comprehended before an initiative is flighted.

Having a template for an initiative would be HUGE in the friction it reduces in later phases. Ultimately, it would further assist in bringing in additional use cases, and users, further up the funnel.

I would agree that this is a very important capability for our company. We have a relatively new product team and I'm trying to drive consistency across the team for what we include in the initiative description. This would be a big help to us!

Please revisit. This is critical to adoption of AHA as the planning tool for our organization for all the reasons noted below.

Thanks.

Can you please reconsider this. There is tremendous value in having the ability to customize description for Initiatives. Right now this is stopping us from properly implementing our development process with Aha as the main product management tool. Consistent and clear descriptions to initiatives is the most important documentation we want to store. You make a risky assumptions by associating value of templates for initiatives with the amount of them compared to other record types. To the contrary, they are fewer because the reflect big focuses and big investments. The big ticket items. So there would be less harm in our case if we'd have templates for Initiatives and not for other record types.

Being able to save a template for an initiative would be valuable as we would like to drive executive initiative review sessions across multiple "critical" initiatives using Aha versus filling in slide templates. The senior team at different businesses like our likely want to see certain information that is relevant for their business, and templates would allow that to be done without the need to administer custom fields. Example "sections" for a critical initiative review session we'd want product leaders to have in their initiative body:

• Description

• Value Statement / Strategic Alignment

• Platforms Involved / Workstreams

• Impacted Business Units

• Key Risks & Issues (as a table with remediation thoughts for each

• Status Summary

• Last Period Accomplishments

• This Period Focus

With templates, we could drive the review using an Aha presentation of Initiatives with all the info we need.

Agreed!  After using Aha with my previous company, we could have benefited greatly from an Initiative template.  In my current role, this would also be exceedingly helpful as we look to bring standardization of process to our product management team. These templates provide a guide to ensure all the relevant information is captured in order to proceed with the next steps (i.e. epics, features, etc.).  Personally I would find the Initiative template very beneficial!

We'd like to use templates in the Initiative description (and more broadly, in any text field) because we'd like an alternative to notes field proliferation. Each team wants their one unique set of questions answered. For example, one team just asked for this information in their initiatives:

ID Customer Problem
Spike/POC
Release Test Plan
Marketing Setup
Analytics Setup
UI design/Content/Visual design
Build
Post-release monitoring

and I'm not excited about creating a custom field for each.

There is definitely a case to be made for initiative templates to assist with capturing the key pieces of information the first time. Reviews of the initiatives will be quicker with this aid to best practice. 

Templates for initiatives are fundamental to driving consistency and scaling in large organizations with large numbers of product managers with varied backgrounds ad experience levels. The alternative is that we attach a text file, which detracts from the value and appeal of using a modern product management tool.

Yes! My company has been in business for 100+ years but our Product Mgmt team is brand-new and Aha! allows us to start with a clean slate. We would find great value in a template for our Initiatives (and Goals as well, if possible).