We have a defined product master plan built within Aha!

James Rose

Chief Financial Officer

We had a problem

We used to store our product management information in an ad-hoc way. For example, client requests were spread across multiple documents and spreadsheets. This made it difficult to identify strategic themes for our product roadmap and pull everything together into a cohesive plan.

Our platform contains multiple components — including application gathering, primary source verification, credentialing, reporting, and sanctions monitoring. This creates complexity as we have a lot of dependencies to manage from a technical standpoint as well as across teams. Previously, it was also difficult to track who was working on what and the status. This is because we lacked a common platform and a common process to manage our work. We wanted a better way to define our product strategy, clarify our priorities, and improve transparency across the company.

Aha! as a solution

We now have a clearly defined master plan for our organization. We use Aha! to capture strategic goals and then associate them with initiatives and features. This allows us to set clear expectations about what matters most and to be more deliberate in the way we prioritize work.

The ability to integrate Aha! with Microsoft Azure DevOps is critical to our product management process. It lets us funnel work from ideation through to development in a consistent way. We have also customized the terminology in Aha! to mirror Azure DevOps so that we all use the same language when we refer to different record types and workflow statuses.

Aha! is a powerful solution that provides roll-up visibility across all of our strategic goals and initiatives. We have significantly increased our process maturity and are now able to execute in a consistent and efficient way.

We have extended our use of Aha! beyond the product team. Our leadership, operations, and client services teams also use Aha! to manage their work. This gives us a shared platform to improve alignment across the business and to streamline our processes.

Life is good

Aha! provides a centralized system that allows us to create a roadmap for the entire company. We follow a goal-first approach and tie our product plans directly to business objectives. Now that we have one master list for all of our ideas, we can easily prioritize them against our high-level strategy.

Aha! gives us the clarity — and the data — to make better business decisions and allows our entire organization to execute against our strategy.

We also have better visibility into who is accountable for each initiative. This creates a more transparent work environment and allows us to track progress in real time. The ability to visualize how different parts of the organization interact also helps us to manage dependencies more effectively.