How we keep everyone connected to what we're doing in Aha!

Bryan McCarty

Sr. Product Manager, Banno Platform™

We had a problem

Aligning strategy and priorities across different teams working on Banno was a challenge. Each team — iOS, Android, JavaScript, Product, Services, Infrastructure, Implementation, Support, Operations — was marching to different priorities and had their own view of the world.

Everything related to managing our products (ideas, priorities, features, requirements, scope of work, prototypes, etc.) lived in a variety of places across a variety of team leads. We had Google docs, spreadsheets, whiteboard photos, email threads, GitHub, Slack messages, and face-to-face conversations floating across the entire team. We needed to capture ideas and feature requests in a central place. And we also needed to share our roadmap internally to the wider audience of more than 6,000 Jack Henry employees and also have a consistent external roadmap to share with customers and prospects.

In short, there was no central hub or understanding of one source of truth. Our roadmap was nonexistent — and very different depending on who you asked!

Aha! as a solution

Aha! brought greater alliance amongst Banno and Jack Henry teams. We have better, more accurate communication — both internally and externally. We now use both the Slack and GitHub integrations and enjoy enhanced collaboration.

From a daily workflow standpoint, everyone involved can look at the Aha! feature card to understand what we are building and why. In the description field, we use the jobs-to-be-done framework to write job stories that explain the user's motivation. We also use the description to point people to the resources they need in order for them to do what they need on the project, such as scope of work documents, prototypes, and functional specs. The requirement fields captures everything related to the feature in one place.

Aha! is our source of truth. It has helped us put the necessary processes in place to stay focused on building valuable products rather than managing spreadsheets, documents, and whiteboard pictures.

We also use a variety of Aha! reports to help us visualize our roadmap. We take these saved report views and one of our designers uses it to create a customer-facing version that is specifically branded to match our design language and style guide. Then, we post the roadmap in our customer portal. This flow has worked out extremely well and enables us to quickly publish beautiful and accurate roadmaps.

Life is good

We now funnel everything into Aha! We use the ideas portal to collect ideas and feature requests. Banno product managers work in Aha! on an hourly basis, making decisions about ideas, writing job stories, defining requirements, and building the collective roadmap. If it's not in Aha! — it doesn't exist!

With a company of 6,000 people, it's not easy to communicate our roadmap or to keep everyone connected to what we're up to. Aha! has changed that. We're constantly adding reviewers and showing people how they can track what they need to stay informed. This gives other teams direct access to our feature boards, where they can watch features. It's a great way for teams to understand where Banno is heading and when certain features will ship.

Aha! helps our growing team stay aligned and connected to what we’re building, while maintaining a shared knowledge, understanding, and agreement about roadmap priorities.

There's never a question about where our product team should be investing our time. All teams now have a shared view into the immediate work that needs to be done and the vision of where we're heading.