Aha! improved efficiency throughout our entire organization

Kevin Woley

Director of Program Management

We had a problem

Our clients count on us to help them be more efficient. But our company was spending a lot of effort on redundant planning and disorganized communication. Our solutions serve a range of end users — including both employees and customers of utility companies — but we didn’t have a reliable way to track dependencies between solution teams.

Each product team did its own thing when it came to product planning, using Google Docs in multiple formats. And soliciting and triaging ideas for product improvements from around the company was really hard. We would share ideas in email, docs, however we could — but they’d often get lost. We care deeply about our products and our customers, so it was frustrating that the people providing ideas didn’t feel confident they’d been heard.

Aha! as a solution

With Aha!, we now have one place to collect, organize, and share our plans. This helps us work more collaboratively and leverage our technology more efficiently across a range of solutions. We can easily engage the executive team in planning and share progress with them through roadmaps and robust reports.

Aha! enables our entire company to consolidate customer and internal feedback into one place. The Ideas portal has been a huge win for collecting and organizing our most valuable feature requests.

Aha! also gives us a way to clearly identify and track our dependencies across teams, too, so we can stay on track with our frequent releases. The bi-directional Jira integration lets us send our development teams all the requirements and feature information they need to build out technical solutions in the tool they prefer. And finally, we have a single place where we can collect, score, manage, promote, and communicate about ideas.

Life is good

One of the most powerful benefits we’ve seen with Aha! is in coordinating across teams working on the same product. Understanding our product direction used to require the time-consuming exercise of sorting through a loose collection of documents. But with Aha!, we can invest far less time doing product planning, and we get far better results.

Cross team coordination used to require multiple Google Docs and Sheets — now we’ve got one tool to coordinate all of our strategic work across multiple teams.

Our engineers can ship in rapid iterations and know that their work is helping to address the complex challenges of making our customers’ homes and businesses more energy efficient. And, thanks to the Ideas portal, now everyone knows exactly what is happening with their ideas.