We got back on track working as a team using Aha!

Bryan Dunn

Senior Director, Product Management

We had a problem

We had several problems before our adoption of Aha! The lack of a standard tool that our whole product team could use really hindered our work. The use of endless tools led to inconsistency in our product development process. We also did not have a public roadmap — or, more importantly, a specific way to share our roadmap with all who needed updates.

The lack of visibility led to several bad launches — and frustration amongst development teams who could not understand how their work mapped to the greater business strategy. They started to lose confidence in what they were building. And since no one on our product team could find the information they needed, there was a lot of general inefficiency.

Aha! as a solution

Our product team got right to work within Aha! once we realized it the tool we had always needed. First, we created a standard workflow for product managers complete with discovery, validation, usability, and test activities. We also used custom fields to add structure to features. This ensures that all aspects of a new feature are considered during each phase.

Aha! allows us to greatly optimize our efficiency by adding consistency and sanity to our product development process.

We set up custom roadmap views for our product marketing and sales engineering teams to give them all the specific information and context that they need prior to each launch. Aha! helped us automate a process that used to be manual. I can’t even calculate how many hours our team used to spend creating custom roadmap views. Not having to do that has saved our team so much time that we now spend on the big picture.

We leveraged Goals, Initiatives, and Features with clear mappings all the way down the chain so our feature crews knew exactly how the work they were doing would help the business.

Life is good

Our team’s previous mix of tools made it hard for stakeholders to get details about development effort and launches. It was equally hard for us to use best practices across our whole team. Aha! has put us all back on track by helping us work as a true team for the first time.

Thanks to Aha! we now have a single source of truth, a consistent workflow, and a much more efficient organization.

Everyone — from senior executives to front-end developers — uses Goals, Initiatives, and Features in Aha! with clear mappings all the way down the chain. Now, we can all see exactly how the work we do will impact the business. That clarity cannot be overstated — it gives all of us newfound confidence and helps align our daily tasks with our company vision.