We used an Aha! ideas portal to streamline requests

James Stevens

Product Development Manager (Journals and Books)

We had a problem

Our product team got more feature requests than we knew how to handle. These requests came from many places — including business stakeholders, website users, and the dev team. This volume of ideas was overwhelming, as we had no way to manage and prioritize them. This left our product team concerned that we were missing great ideas with strong potential to become features. We also did not know how to rank each new feature idea against our most important metrics.This challenge was compounded by our status as an agile product team. Our priorities shift constantly, and it was hard to make our backlog reflect this. It did not help that our dev teams used different systems for their own work. This resulted in a lack of visibility. Keeping our work aligned with the dev team was always harder than it had to be. We knew something had to change.

Aha! as a solution

The Aha! ideas portal has really improved our ability to record feature requests and improvements highlighted by our customers. This has also increased dialogue between our customers and product team. Now, our customers feel like they have a voice in what gets built — because they have a clear way to share their ideas and watch them become part of the product.

Aha! gives back so much time to product managers that are often swamped with requests.

The Aha! scorecard is a huge help with this. It allows us to see which ideas are most relevant to our business metrics. Then, we can prioritize submitted ideas according to which ones will have the strongest impact on our product and business. Because Aha! is so simple to integrate with Jira, our development teams always see the latest changes to our user stories. This really cuts down on confusion.

Life is good

The ideas portal in Aha! has cut the time we take recording and prioritizing feature requests in half. This leaves us a lot more time to focus on high-level strategy — time that we did not have before Aha! The Initiatives mapping tool has also given us many hours back.

Time is a product manager’s most crucial resource. Aha! has given our product team so much precious time back.

We used to manually produce and disseminate roadmaps; not having to do so is a welcome change. And the fact that goals can be linked to strategies, initiatives, and features is very helpful for documenting work. It helps our whole business see where we are going — and how we plan to get there.