We all share the same business priorities thanks to Aha!

Sam Marsh

Principal product owner

We had a problem

Prior to using Aha!, we stored our roadmaps in PowerPoint, and managed our product backlogs in Excel. This created a number of challenges. First, there was a high risk that an old version of a roadmap could be used in customer discussions, resulting in mis-set expectations. Second, we needed a better way to collaborate with stakeholders regarding goals, requirements, and user needs. To achieve the desired customer experience, we also needed to reduce ambiguity and provide the development team with more detailed context.

Aha! as a solution

We now have a single place to manage and share all of our product planning information. Anyone in our organization can easily view the prioritized backlog for all products and the status of each feature. This has increased transparency about our roadmap plans and makes it easy for everyone to know what to expect and when.

Aha! provides clarity into the “why,” “when,” and “what” of our roadmap strategy. Everyone in our organization benefits from the increased transparency and collaboration that comes from making our product planning information easily accessible and visible.

In addition, Aha! lets us capture all of the necessary details to communicate the value and requirements for each feature. We use custom fields to include additional context about the benefit to the customer and identify any risks and limitations. This helps us to understand what we are taking on before we commit to a feature on the roadmap. It also ensures that, as a feature progresses through the product life cycle, the development team has clarity about what they are building and why. The quality of what we deliver is now much higher as we are aligned around building what the customer actually wants.

Integrating Aha! with other key systems in our organization has been vital to keeping information flowing between teams. The Salesforce integration lets us dynamically attribute a dollar value to each feature based on actual opportunities. Our prioritization decisions are now influenced by the direct impact to the business. We leverage the integration between Aha! and Jira to have real-time progress information. It also makes reporting on the status of releases and features much easier as we can easily access the information we need in Aha!

Life is good

Aha! keeps everyone at our company moving in the same direction. We share the same understanding of our business goals and priorities and why they are important. Having a clearly defined strategic plan reduces conflict and confusion and enables us to align our efforts across the organization.

Aha! is easy to use and very customizable. We have adapted it to meet our exact requirements so that it truly reflects the way we work as an organization.

Furthermore, our roadmaps are now always up-to-date. Any changes are automatically reflected within seconds, eliminating version control worries and providing a high degree of confidence regarding the accuracy of the information.