What is Reddit's opinion of Aha!?

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Hi Friend! Vice President of Product and hiring manager here.

Look, when I ask someone at the entry level to do something like this here's what I'm looking for:

1. Can they put the user first? Yah we want a ticket booking mobile app, but what do we have to do to make this easier for our customers? Bonus points when you specify which kinds of users and articulate that some users are different from others. Are we trying to attract young users who are more mobile friendly? Do we need to cut costs but our only rider base is older folks, so we need an app that is easy for them to use?
2. Can you put together features in a coherent way that makes some sense as to what the minimum thing we'd need first? Yah sign in with Google is nice, but maybe we can cut that for an alpha to see if people will use it without that?
   
3. Can you identify key components that we absolutely need? Probably can't have an app without some kinda login, searching across schedules and a way to pay and use the app to board? I'm just making it up?
4. Can you break things into testable releases? What's the SMALLEST thing we could try first in a limited environment? Can you think about how trying this might impact our employees who aren't tech savvy?
5. How would you tell our folks about it? How would you tell the world about it? How would you get people using it?
   

FYI this is a good PRD template- I use a modified version of this with my team: https://www.aha.io/roadmapping/guide/requirements-management/what-is-a-good-product-requirements-document-template

I hope this helps you get started. Kudos to you for asking and good luck out there.

If you're relying on JavaScript package after package instead of just writing your own code a whole host of bad things can happen.

A. Size of your deployment balloons B. Duplicated packages to maintain compatibility C. You're using something that is already in base JavaScript now (solving a problem that was already solved) D. The package isn't maintained (or hasn't been for years)

Here's a good article I found highlighting some of the problems.

Also my own personal opinion is that you should know how to code a solution in standard JavaScript for a good chunk of the problems you encounter. That's not to say you should start a JavaScript project without a framework. You should, but from there you should be selective about what you need when it comes to libraries.

For new people, just start a project with Angular, React(technically not a framework), or VUE and then go from there and only add libraries as needed. Angular especially has a boat load of built in tools that will solve most of your problems. Add the most maintained and popular libraries for what you're going to be working with.

Doing lots of animations? Anime.js Doing tons of charts? D3.js Using tons of forms? Parsley.js (I'm sure there are others/alternatives I'm just listing the popular ones I know)

Libraries aren't bad and they make your life easier in a lot of cases if you're smart about it.

What tools do you use for your roadmap, and in which form do you have it? Is it just a presentation? Or a gantt chart? Or a spreadsheet? There are quite a few specialized apps like aha, shipit, prodpad, and many others, each doing it its own way. Or you have a completely different one fine-tuned for genomics (like some hardware companies have)?

Not sure if we should try to transition into product management, but many do. My dad started as a software engineer in the 80’s and did that for awhile and that at some point he pivoted to becoming a product owner/manager and he’s been doing that since. The pay is comparable and the work is challenging in its own ways.

From my experience as a dev, at a high level, product managers gather requirements from customers and sort of decide what direction to take the product. They’ll prioritize requirements and bugs, provide clarity to developers regarding requirements, etc. One thing some product managers do that I think is often overlooked is train sales and customer support on the product and make sure they know how it’s supposed to work for when they need to sell or assist customers.

Here’s more info that may provide a better understanding than what my personal experience provides: https://www.aha.io/roadmapping/guide/product-management/what-is-the-role-of-a-product-manager

No, that's more like project management or technical program management.

You can read a bit more on a PM role here: https://www.aha.io/roadmapping/guide/product-management/what-is-the-role-of-a-product-manager

Sounds interesting and I can see an increasing market for this kind of thing. Worth looking at things like A-ha though as I think it’s already offering a pretty comprehensive version of what you’ve described (or pretty close to it).

Sounds like you are looking for something along the lines of mapping a product roadmap. Check this out and see if this is what you're looking for: https://www.aha.io/

Can you sketch up and share exactly what you're looking for? I am trying hard to picture what you mean by "capacity vertically".

First of all congrats you are not staying where you are! I just want to give you some recommendations overall and not only related to DE role. Because now you need to understand you will be required to learn new stuff your whole life. So

1/ From the school I believe biology can be a technology. But please ask yourself what is your mindset? Is it more technical or more humanitarian? I mean what you love to do more - playing with tech, math, doing bio formulas etc or maybe you are interested in history or languages or nature. How comfortable are you learning DE now?

2/ If your answer is tech - any SE position will fit you (DE as well, of course).

3/ But if the answer is No - I would not recommend you to chose DE role. I would recommend you to chose some product role (product manager and later owner, business analyst etc). There is a bunch of product roles where you can find yourself https://www.aha.io/roadmapping/guide/product-management/what-makes-up-the-product-team From a business analyst later you might become data analyst if you want. Nobody, even you, knows your path now. ;)

4/ Don't just study. Please apply your knowledge right away in several directions. By doing a pet project, by involving yourself in some opensource project (fix and push some bugs there, join the community, help others there). Try to find a job asap. Some junior one, even volunteer but do something for production right now.

The market is overloaded now. I am (as a head of engineering of adtech saas service) looking for one more DE in our team right now and the same is for most companies. I think you will find a job easily but you need to prove your willingness and ability to switch.

Good luck to you. And if you have any questions, I will gladly help. ;)

good questions:

I personally look for “what metrics define success for this product”. I care less about “how”. Burn down charts in particular aren’t a measure of success, but if you wanted to add the the cycle time for new features decreases by “x” that would be ok for me.

Prioritization frameworks-here are a few to read up on, but it should be fluid based on product/opportunity etc, sometimes a simple “value/effort” 4 or 9 box can be useful. https://www.aha.io/roadmapping/guide/release-management/prioritization-framework

Failing fast - determine a point in your product delivery to define “persevere, pivot or kill”, don’t keep building and define “delivered product” success. Define milestones/hypotheses and set guardrails of what would mean “kill it”.

RAIDs- simple SOS focused on what is slowing the team or impacting delivery. Risks/Assumptions (or Action)/Impediments/dependencies. My team does it weekly, with a clear escalation process (starts at team/awareness for me as PM, escalates to product family for support, then ecosystem if we need it).

The purpose is transparency and visibility on progress/impacts/impediments, thus enabling you as PO to message appropriately

AHA https://www.aha.io/ is nice for gathering internal votes and requests for new features. You can monitor demand in the AHA tool before adding items to your roadmap. Also, you can communicate back to your users about requests that don't have enough demand to take forward into your roadmap.

https://www.aha.io/roadmapping/guide/product-management/what-makes-up-the-product-team

it really depends on the business and how it is organised. Usually they have solution owner or product owner who reports teams progress CTO,CEO or whatever depending on the business

Hi! I'll try to answer as much as I can, but feel free to DM, I don't check this account often. Disclaimer: my area is Bay area, but I'm familiar with the roles of PM and PJM in Europe and Asia as well (worked/had offers/mentored).

>So are you saying a Product Manager never works on Projects?

PM's work is not project focused, they do participate in projects same as developers, scrum masters, marketing, etc., but that's not their scope, instead they focus on product strategy. Here's a nice article answering that question: https://www.aha.io/blog/the-product-manager-vs-project-manager

Or search for "project manager" in /r/ProductManagement, you will see how strongly people feel about being confused for a project/program manager. While I don't subscribe to that negativity, I do agree with the importance in differentiating the roles. I used to project manage earlier in my career and the role and the skills needed are absolutely different. Product Manager is closer to strategy, marketing, user research, than it is to project management. It's a very creative role as well, unlike PJM, as you have to deal with enormous amounts of ambiguity and tough decisions.

As for the work you did: it seems you did a bit of everything, owning roadmap is what a PM would usually do, but answer this: how did you decide what to build out of the requirements you gathered? Did you develop a product strategy? Did you consider the business impact? Did you identify new pain points (as opposed to incremental improvements)? Did you write user stories or tech specs? How did you deal with trade offs? In either case, you did some PM work, but the extent of your exposure will be clearer based on answers to those questions.

Probably not so much the Agile influence, but i would agree with the whole MVP mindset. As a developer myself, i find the term and mindset around MVP as a scourge and a recipe for disaster.

To me Minimum Lovable Product is a much better approach that should be more widely used then MVP. Customer expectations have changed a lot these days especially in the software space. Google is a prime example of MVP more times then not, going wrong. They release products with the bare minimum of features (Especially compared to previous iterations of their own apps that do the same thing) with features that a majority of what people want missing.

I think this sums up some of the major differences quite well: https://www.aha.io/blog/minimum-viable-product-vs-minimum-lovable-product

This looks most like a mind map.

I know Mindmanager can plot a mindmap with the Kanban style column view overlaid.

It can also sync with data sources thought this is finicky in my experience and often involves round trips through Excel. I’ve never made it work satisfactorily at scale.

You’re probably better prototyping the approach manually in Miro or Mural. There is a mindmap widget in Miro but I’d suggest handcrafting what you do with their Cards object and the lines between them because these are the objects that can be synced with Jira. But you can’t sync the relationships which is the tricky but important part.

The one way I can imagine getting what you want involves a lot of work but it’s to export data from your roadmap tool and build a custom viz in Tableau using the workarounds that allow Sankey diagrams (which aren’t built in to Tableau) to render the view you want. I’m not just speculating as a much more technical colleague did something pretty close to this. But it was a lot of work and very fragile.

I’m interested to see if others who use ProdPad or ProductBoard or Jira Align other roadmapping tools know of view in one of those tools. Aha doesn’t do what you want in a usable way even though there is a relationship view that taunts you with being close in concept it just is not usable: https://www.aha.io/support/roadmaps/strategic-roadmaps/analytics/diagram-report

We use user story mapping to map the product backbone and break it down into manageable pretty well defined features. See for example following links to get a quick idea.

https://www.aha.io/roadmapping/guide/release-management/what-is-user-story-mapping

https://plan.io/blog/user-story-mapping/

What to plan and how on the technical side is another thing. But story maps give you a clear idea of the product backbone and what each of those should contain.

Interesting! Why then, do you think so many developer driven companies seem to brag about not having sales? The second link I provided seems to show it’s inevitable and your logic is sound.

I just came across another company, Aha!, that outright brags about not having sales in their job listings.. It’s a mystery to me.

Aha! does. This looks like the same robust “v2” integration I’m used to using with Jira, it won’t just create an issue but provides a full 2-way* sync of whatever you want including custom fields.

*you can configure fields to sync in only 1 direction or even to sync only once if you want.

https://www.aha.io/support/roadmaps/integrations/github/github-integration-version-2

We use Aha and it covers a lot of what you're looking for, including release planning and sharing roadmaps. I would not say it's amazing but it gets the job done.

At times, it feels a little cluttered and too much functionality rather than focusing on key benefits (similar to Atlasssian's suite of products). They also have a solid support team as well.

One good part is that they have an ideas portal that allows feedback from users (clients) and internal team members. You can then promote those to features.

Hope that helps

Were at different places in life as I’ve just started my career after graduating with a bachelors business degree. I finished school, started in consulting, couldn’t deal with the grind. I have no advice to give on starting a new career.

However, I recently started a new job as a Product Manager, which took everything I loved about business but is giving me so much more creative space and problem solving that is fulfilling and more mentally challenging than formatting power points, which I’m loving so far. It is more technical and I’ll be leaving several coding languages along the way, but here are some links about the field in general:

https://blog.hubspot.com/service/become-product-manager

https://www.aha.io/roadmapping/guide/product-management/what-is-the-role-of-a-product-manager

Hope this helps!

I worked my ass off through many roles and got pulled from different department heads over several years and ended up as a Global Product Manager specialising in rugged fibre optics. Details of a typical product manager role is here. It took time and commitment and the role is very rewarding but hard work. I transitioned to a Global BDM so edged more in to sales but in my industry it’s essential to have the engineering background as I interact directly with other engineers and also industry standards.

"Product management is an important organizational role. Product managers are typically found at companies that are building products or technology for customer or internal use. This role evolved from the brand manager position that is often found at consumer packaged goods companies.

The product manager is responsible for the strategy, roadmap, and feature definition for that product or product line. The position may also include marketing, forecasting, and profit and loss (P&L) responsibilities.

Activities span from strategic to tactical and includes the following objectives:

• Set a product vision and strategy that is differentiated and delivers unique value based on customer demands. This includes defining personas and analyzing market and competitive conditions.
• Define what the product team will deliver and the timeline for implementation. This includes creating a release plan, capturing actionable feedback and ideas, and prioritizing features.
• Provide cross-functional leadership, most notably between engineering teams, sales and marketing, and support. A key aspect of this is communicating the product roadmap and keeping everyone informed of updates."

Google Docs for FRs are tedious. (Hence why few contribs).
Why not open an Aha.io board?
https://www.aha.io/product/features/ideas#tour-nav

Product Manager, e.g., https://www.aha.io/roadmapping/guide/product-management/what-is-the-role-of-a-product-manager