Aha! enables sharing of information across our product lines

Sikia Soller

Product Manager

We had a problem

Previously, we had no way of ensuring that releases were in line with our product vision. We couldn’t track how product enhancements linked to goals and initiatives, making it difficult to stay aligned. Further, we needed a better way of giving stakeholders — including sales, marketing, services, and support — a voice in determining which features are included in each release. Finally, reporting on the status of releases was a problem for us as we couldn’t easily give stakeholders the information they needed.

Aha! as a solution

Aha! helps us stay on track. By associating all features directly with goals and initiatives, we can check that we’re following our roadmap. We also use scorecards to determine which features are implemented in a given release based on input from our stakeholders. In addition, the reporting capabilities in Aha! allow us to provide stakeholders with updates at any given moment. This makes it much easier to communicate where we’re at during a release cycle and share information about upcoming requirements and features.

Aha! keeps our product vision on track. By linking goals and initiatives directly to product enhancements, we’ve been able to streamline our release management process and move our product forward in alignment with our roadmap.

Our engineering team uses Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) to track their development work. So we are using the Aha! integration with TFS to keep both systems in sync.

Life is good

It was very important to us to create a release workflow that is easy for our product managers and development teams to follow. We’ve been impressed with the extent to which we can adapt Aha! to meet our needs. We’ve changed terminology, added custom fields, and modified layouts — all in a very quick and easy manner.

Aha! is an extremely intuitive tool to use and can be easily adapted to meet the needs of multiple products within an organization.

As more products under the Cincom umbrella implement Aha!, it is a huge benefit to see the different strategies, workflows, and reports that are being used. This makes it easier to share information across product lines, streamline our processes, and make our communication and reporting more efficient.