How we unified portfolio planning with Aha! Roadmaps
Peter Bongiorno
Senior director, product portfolio management
We had an opportunity
We are a global provider of financial crime, risk, and compliance solutions. Our portfolio includes more than 15 products across multiple business units, managed by more than 100 product managers. But we lacked a cohesive approach to planning. Teams relied on a patchwork of tools — including Excel, PowerPoint, Jira, and Confluence — which made collaboration difficult.
As we transitioned our portfolio to the cloud, the need for unified planning became clear. We wanted to build a shared cloud architecture that all our solutions could leverage. Without a standard approach to product development, it was difficult to manage dependencies and maintain alignment. R&D struggled to prioritize work as each team defined requirements, created roadmaps, and tracked progress differently. This made it even harder to coordinate across the portfolio.
Aha! as a solution
We love having Aha! Roadmaps as our centralized system for product management. We structure the workspace hierarchy to mirror our organizational structure — from high-level portfolios down to individual products. This gives every team a dedicated space to plan, all while making it easy to align on timelines and stay connected to the broader roadmap.
We use the Aha! ideas portal to manage internal requests. Teams now submit cross-functional requests using custom forms. From there, we can efficiently assign items to the right team for review, disposition, and eventual implementation. This gives us visibility into the full lifecycle, from initial ask to final delivery.
Another key improvement is how we use Aha! software to support our Requirements Quality Program. At NiCE Actimize, we believe great products start with great requirements. This program uses peer evaluations and custom scorecards to assess requirement quality and completeness before specs reach R&D, ensuring they are clear, complete, and aligned with our strategic goals. This reduces the risk of improper designs, inaccurate estimates, wasted development effort, and delayed releases. Custom reports in Aha! Roadmaps help us track quality over time and identify opportunities for improvement — from new templates to better guidance and coaching from product managers.
We now have clear standards for product planning — resulting in a 40% improvement in requirement quality, stronger alignment with R&D, and more efficient development.
Life is good
Aha! Roadmaps has transformed how we plan and collaborate across the organization. We run cross-portfolio planning summits every six months, with each team working from a shared view to align our strategic roadmap. Leaders can trace strategy through to delivery and see dependencies across groups. This creates more transparency and confidence in our planning process.
With Aha! Roadmaps, we now have a level of cross-team coordination and planning confidence that was simply not possible using our previous methods. We have measurable improvements in requirement quality and consistency, plus a clear top-to-bottom view of the alignment between our product investments and the business's strategic goals.
These improvements offer a real competitive advantage. We are now better equipped to deliver integrated solutions that support our broader cloud transformation.
Looking ahead, we continue to expand how we use Aha! Roadmaps. We are building visual requirements using Aha! Whiteboards and enhancing reporting and forecasting through the Power BI integration. This expanded use of Aha! Roadmaps will help us streamline collaboration and deliver greater value to the business.
