How we maintain alignment across teams in Aha!

Barrie Hadfield

CTOI

We had a problem

Everyone wants to keep his or her CEO happy. For us this meant being able to communicate our product development status clearly and expeditiously to the CEO, to each other and to our customers. To do this, everyone needed to be on the same page and speaking the same language when discussing the product roadmap.

We wanted to be able to share what the team did yesterday, what we did today and what our blocking issues were using a common standard. We also needed to be able to share the product roadmaps with a wider audience including accurate timelines. We wanted communication to equal productivity. This just wasn’t happening for us.

Aha! as a solution

Aha! makes the whole team happy—from the CEO to marketing, sales and engineering. Aha! allows us to define our product and then clearly and beautifully visualize our product goals and objectives by giving us the option to organize, prioritize, store and view features. As we work in Aha! the team is building and updating the roadmap together dynamically. Team members can see changes as they happen and add their input.

Aha lets us bring order to a very agile process where the stakeholders are more than just the people at the stand ups.

In Aha! we have a shared language and are using the same standards. The roadmap speaks for us by showing progress in real time and in one place for the entire team. With the Aha! notebook, we can also effortlessly create a customized view of any aspects of the roadmap. Then using the Publish feature, we can easily and effectively share with anyone as we choose, using a PDF or secure webpage. Aha! is our dynamic, sharable, happy place for everything in our product roadmap.

Life is good

Aha! powers our product roadmap. Because we have a common language across all products, the team communicates and we can move forward efficiently. In Aha! we easily view and organize our features by release. Then we can focus on prioritizing goals versus features using the customizable Aha! scoring option.

With Aha! enabling our product roadmap, enhanced communication equals amazing productivity.

In Aha! we are also fully integrated with the engineering team. The engineers get what they need to do the work using the Aha! two-way integration with FogBugz. We can move all our features and requirements from Aha! into FogBugz and then back into Aha! as the engineers make changes and updates. Customers get what they want because we are clearly defining features and requirements for the engineers. The Aha! visualization is amazing, allowing the whole team to see and share the product roadmap as it happens. The CEO is happy, the team is happy and the customers get what they want and need.