RELATED IDEAS
Add positioning and models as Aha Record Relationships for custom fields
I am being asked by our leadership team to show a relationship between our models/positioning diagrams and our strategic initiatives. I thought this would be easily done by creating a custom field at the initiative level, but I have discovered that the items in the Foundation section of the Strategy are not available as Aha Record Relationships. Support helped me find away around this by using the URL feature within the Notes field, but this is far from ideal and now requires me to manage the model titles in two locations.
This was something we were looking for in our demo today, that we would like to put a lean canvas around all of our major initiatives. I don't have too much to add as others have explained the use case in the comments, but having a direct link to the model with an initiative aligns to the strategic process we'd like to implement.
We would love to see the positioning and models at the idea or feature level. Often a new idea could end up being a new product OR a large scale feature for an existing product. The positioning and models would allow us to track initial business strategies related to that new idea or feature separate from the main workspace.
Agree with the comments here, we find ourselves using the lean canvas to define an initiative or master feature as it clearly lays out our assumptions and vision. At the moment we are (#)hash tagging the lean canvas into the description for the initiative as a workaround.
I completely agree with all the comments, this is needed. I too did the custom URL field. By adding the ability to link this object with an Initiative, it can live under the "Record Links" section of the record, instead of being buried in the custom fields. Not to mention, it will remove the need to remind people to copy over a URL to the initiative.
I agree with both Jason and Alexander on this. For us, an initiative that is under consideration would start with model before being approved by our senior leadership / board members. I think a merging of the model capabilities with the initiative/feature capabilities would be very useful. Let me explain...
The useful thing about models are the flexibility and control you have in laying out the data you would like to present. This is very useful for executive presentations and allows an item in Aha! to look less like a "ticket" and more like the business case analysis its designed to be. Where it falls down though is in the tracking of data fields that are more ticket based, like owner, date created/modified and perhaps most importantly, status. Here is where the workflow capabilities of an initiative or feature play a huge role.
Right now, i can create the custom field as described by Jason/Alexander to manually link the model cards to my initiatives but that is a manual step that my users need to remember to do and it’s not easy to describe the workflow for that. Alternatively, I could create all the fields that i have on my models as custom fields in the Initiative so that there was no need to link to a separate model but that loses the presentation capabilities of the model.
Ideally for me, any object that can have a workflow should also have model capabilities as well. I think of it as a baseball card. The picture of the player on one side (model - no pun intended) and all the stats on the other (ticket workflow data). This capability would merge two distinct capabilities of Aha! into a powerful new way of presenting ALL the data related to an initiative/feature to different audiences from a single place.
Echoing this. We build out a Lean Canvas for every substantial product idea and the lack of ability to link them together is frustrating.