A common issue that we have seen is that users would like to subscribe to weekly digest emails for their products and the checkbox is not available to do so. This occurs when your user role has been assigned at the product line level and is then inherited for each of the products in that product line. The only recourse at this point is either for Product Owners to add them as Users to the product or for Admins to re-assign the roles at the product level (instead of product line level). Both these options result in additional unnecessary work for the user, product owners, and admins.
It was explained that this behavior is by design taking into account support for very large projects, where the administrators might simply want to grant everyone access at the top-level of the hierarchy. In those cases, large volumes of emails would automatically be sent by default (one for every project that you've inherited). This design prevents the automatic sending of potentially scores of emails to customers each week who may not find them useful.
I believe a better design would be when users roles are added at the Product Line level and roles inherited at the product level, that users should have access to the setting but have the default setting for this weekly notifications be set to off. The users should then be able to choose to subscribe to the email for their products per their choosing by going into their Personal Notification settings. Likewise, it would be much easier for Product Owners to enable the digest as requested in the Product User settings.
We are excited to introduce updated email notification preferences and digest emails. This was an extremely popular request and something we have been working hard to deliver. You now have complete control over what emails you receive and how frequently you receive them. Check out our blog post for more details.
Agreed - the full power of Aha is in the implicit hierarchy and inheritance - this feature currently does not take that into account. I agree that the default behavior should be to have the option available but deselected.