We now focus on putting strategy first thanks to Aha!

Gary Wu

Product Manager

We had a problem

Before Aha!, we had a lot of issues with our product roadmapping process. Like many other rapidly growing technology companies, Acquia had organically built its own product planning processes to suit its needs. This home-grown approach worked well through the first part of the company’s rapid growth.

Then the overhead of maintaining this approach and the resulting explosion of documents to support planning for an increasingly complex product portfolio sapped velocity from the product managers. Our home-grown product planning process had put us in full document overload. We also suffered from a lack of transparency for stakeholders. The legacy product planning approach created a siloed view of Acquia’s product roadmap since each product manager created his own product plans in his own format. Customers’ referenced one deck for one product roadmap, and another deck for another product.

With all this compartmentalization, the product managers struggled to ensure that the roadmaps were updated and reflected Acquia’s latest strategic decisions. We needed to get to a single portfolio roadmap view that could be easily utilized by customers and team members alike.

Aha! as a solution

Aha! is a fully-integrated product roadmapping application delivered as SaaS and it gives us exactly what we were looking for in product management software. Gone are the custom PPT presentations and the numerous documents to look through for each individual product. Aha! is an agile, lightweight approach to building roadmaps and performing prioritization analysis with a built-in scorecard feature for ranking ideas.

Aha! is the must-have product planning app for product managers by product managers. It seemed like they read our collective minds in building Aha!

The Aha! integration with Jira enables the engineers to be a part of the whole roadmap process and unifies all aspects of product development. Not only can we quickly and easily view, prioritize and analyze the features and products in real time, but we can also share securely share the info with customers and stakeholders alike. We do this using Aha! notebooks for publishing cross-product roadmaps.

Life is good

Using Aha! roadmapping software enables the product managers to get back to the business of product strategy and development. With all of the product lines updated in real time, we can be confident that they reflect Acquia’s latest strategic decisions. This gives us consistency in planning across product managers and the product portfolio that we were previously lacking.

Aha! gave us product managers just what we needed to get back to the business of leading our teams to build great products.

With Aha!, we have a place to define products, our vision and strategy, and to work through every aspect of product development quickly and efficiently. This increases roadmap transparency for both internal and external stakeholders, as well as, customers. Our product managers spend more time on what matters most, product planning, instead of maintaining the process itself.