How we ensured cross-team transparency by using Aha!

Venura Athukorala

Product Management

We had a problem

We listen to our customers and work together to be on the cutting-edge. We are always looking to do more for them and we knew that fine-tuning our product development would lead to quicker, superior results for our customers. Our main challenges centered around release planning and task management. First, we did not have the proper mechanism to link tasks and product requirements. Since we couldn't prioritize features well or estimate the effort development was going to spend on a release we struggled to be efficient. On top of all of this, the communication between product management and engineering was less than optimal. Solving our product planning and task management issues quickly become a top priority.

Aha! as a solution

Aha! offered an easy solution for our product release management problems and a way to put our product planning in high-gear. Aha! has become our one truth in product planning and development. In Aha! we first define the product and its features. We then use the Aha! scoring feature to delineate the importance of each feature and then estimate with engineering the required effort. Each feature can be clearly defined and time planning happens right where it logically should. We can measure the importance and the effort expended for each of the features and best of all, the releases get done on time because of our upfront planning.

It’s all that we need in one package for product management.

Aha! also enables us to sync the defined features with Jira which allows engineering management to assign specific tasks to developers easily and with transparency. Everything is automatically updated easing the burden of communicating overall progress. With the management of our product releases in Aha! our product development processes are no longer slowing us down. In Aha! product management and roadmapping actually feels effortless.

Life is good

Using Aha! our product development is keeping pace with our creativity and our drive to innovate. It's finally a fair match! Aha! is easy to use and it works for the whole team. For the first time, our release plans are visual and really make sense. We finally can define and score products clearly in one place. We use Aha! scoring and planning features which give us the ability to prioritize features and intelligently estimate work times.

Aha! is our one stop solution to all product management problems!

The ability to synch with Jira pulls it all together for us by providing better requirements but allowing developers to continue to use their tool of choice. And with everything automatically updated in both systems we can easily display progress. This degree of transparency is unique and it solves the issue of communicating with the technical and non technical people in the company. We love being able to move through product development smoothly and get our customers exactly what they need when they need it.