SpiraPlan vs airfocus: Which is a better fit?

Dee: Hi there, my name's Dee. I'm a Head of Product, and I work in Environmental Services in the industry in the UK. I am currently reviewing airfocus, and I'd probably give them a 5 in terms of the product itself. So we considered utilizing 2 specific product softwares. One was Roadmap, and one was ProductPlan. This was after a significant period of research. We did trials with them, and with ProductPlan actually we went ahead with getting a license as well. What we did notice was the lack of functionality around prioritization, which is really key within the product software industry. In terms of getting stakeholder decision alignment. And also in terms of knowing what to work on first. So that's a really key decision. And we found that both of these softwares were probably around a 3 or 4 out of 10 in terms of their usage. So we decided against them and we went out to the market to find out some more products. We chose airfocus after a period of research around Roadmapping Software. And we found quite quickly that airfocus provided us the value that we were looking for in terms of strategic priority scoring, customized views of fields, in terms of specific views within, say environmental services as an example. And also something very interesting called as Priority Poker, which means when we align ourselves with 3 or 4 people on call, we do not sway anyone's decision around what the priority of this particular product should be. And actually do it as an individual. Which we thought was really cool, because we can then collectively come back after launching a Priority Poker session and then reaching a conclusion, which is a lot more cohesive and mutual, rather than a lot more driven by say an executive board. So we thought this was a really cool feature, along with all of the other really neat priority scorings that were available on airfocus. And that's why we put in ahead in terms of the other Roadmapping Software, and that's why we selected it. The integration piece we found, it was very simple actually, because there's a couple of sessions whereby the CEO of airfocus actually led demonstrations in a Webinar. So I introduce a lot of my team to that particular Webinar and they found it very engaging, and they adapted to the airfocus terminologies pretty quickly. So that was excellent. That was a good starter point for us to go on this roadmapping journey with airfocus. But I think the integration that really got great points with us, was our integration with Jira, which airfocus was very committed to, rather than the other softwares that we looked at in the market. And we found Jira integration to be at least an 8 or 9 out of 10. Which was super important for us, because our tech team utilizes Jira quite a lot. And any software that we use for product management and roadmapping needed to have that sort of significant Jira integration. So these are a couple of examples of getting adoption of the system high, right at the start with demos. But also having a significant suite of integrations like Jira, Asana and Trello, which really made it comfortable for us to adopt a system quite quickly. We found airfocus really useful, especially in terms of prioritization, strategic indices and also integration. However, there's a couple of things that we have fed back to airfocus in terms of better customization, a little more of a colorful interface that'd be found in other Roadmapping Software. So if anyone's very super creative or if there are any UX designers out there utilizing Roadmapping Software, I would say airfocus is more focused on the prioritization and the strategy elements, rather than the super cool color palettes customization elements. But that's not giving away too much, in terms of them not having this on the roadmap. Because we are informed pretty much all the time in terms of what's coming up next within the airfocus journey. And we have been promised of a presentation worthy, super colorful display mechanism, which would be quite useful for creative designers and product creatives out there. So from that particular perspective, it's on the roadmap and it's happening shortly. But from a perspective of product managers and owners out there, I think it's a fantastic tool, because prioritization is absolutely key and fundamental to what we do in our jobs day to day. And I couldn't recommend airfocus more highly after all the significant research that me and my team had done, in terms of acquiring a Roadmapping Software. So they come pretty highly recommended on that.