We increased organizational visibility by moving to Aha!

Christopher Deck

President

We had a problem


The Deck Commerce product team is very agile. We need the ability to create visual roadmaps that clearly communicate where we are going – and can be easily adjusted for changing dynamics and scenarios. We also need to connect capacity, features, and timeline requirements within a single tool to help us identify and manage needs as well as risks. It was always hard to find a tool that meets all of these criteria. There are very few tools built specifically for product teams. This meant that our own team was forced to use several different tools to complete basic tasks – none of which connected these tasks to the big picture.

Aha! as a solution

I never realized how crucial it is to integrate strategy into our product planning. But once we started using Aha! — and benefitting from the system’s tightly bundled strategy component — I saw how meaningful this is for product planning. The various views within Aha! create options for key roadmapping timelines, such as strategic views at the portfolio level and both internal and public views within the Features Roadmapping section.

PowerPoint. Excel. Project. After years of wrestling with various home-grown approaches to connect product strategy with planning and roadmapping, it was great to finally discover a solution that was built from the ground-up for this purpose.

Leveraging the Features board helps us manage the ever-challenging capacity, features, and timeline balance game. The Strategy section is also a huge help. We use it for weekly and monthly meetings to review key initiatives and monitor progress and/or concerns. Since everyone is using the same software, we have more transparency than ever before.

Life is good

Our product team is migrating away from a disparate collection of Office-based tools and into the common framework of Aha! This ongoing process is increasing visibility across the organization. Our product and client services teams now have a tool to review and socialize product updates to our engineers and clients alike. New tool adoption throughout cross-functional teams is rarely easy or pleasant. Aha! is proving to be the exception.

Aha! has filled a big void in both our product management and corporate planning processes. Its framework has helped us unite around a unifying system and approach.

Deck Commerce has established a goal to drive our project deliverable variances (timeline and budgets) to less than 20%. We believe that Aha! will be essential to help us manage and quantify our efforts — and we have every confidence that this will be achieved.