How Aha! helped us become more focused on delivering value

Luc Van de Vyver

CTO

We had a problem

We needed to improve our product management processes — starting with how we capture and prioritize ideas. Our team was overwhelmed with the volume of requests constantly flowing in from partners as a well as our internal help desk, sales, and product teams. It was difficult to organize and track so many ideas and make value-based prioritization decisions.

It was also challenging to keep our product roadmap current. We practice agile and are constantly adjusting our release plans to reflect the most important business priorities. We used to spend hours each week updating spreadsheets and presentations and creating different versions of our roadmap for different audiences.

In addition, we wanted to improve how we work with our implementation team and communicate status information internally. We outsource our software development, so it is essential that the team clearly understands the priorities and requirements. We also need to track progress closely so that we can intervene as needed and set expectations internally.

Aha! as a solution

Aha! has transformed how we manage our funnel of ideas. We are now able to capture all requests in a centralized location and assess them based on value and cost. Our team meets on a monthly basis and decides which ideas to promote to features in alignment with our company goals. We release updates to our platform every six weeks, so we also use this meeting to decide on implementation priorities.

Aha! enables us to follow a goal-driven approach that validates every decision we make, from prioritizing ideas through to implementing features.

The feature board in Aha! facilitates this discussion. It brings together the most relevant product information in a single view and enables us to make updates on-the-fly. We organize future features in the parking lot using the MoSCoW approach. When we are ready to work on a feature, we pull it into an upcoming release and rank the cards in priority order.

We meet with our product owner bi-weekly to collaborate on requirements and share status updates. Capturing all of the details in Aha! ensures that we all stay in sync on what is up next and where we are at in the feature development lifecycle.

We also make extensive use of Aha! presentations to keep internal stakeholders, partners, and customers informed of our vision and plans. The ability to create variations of the same roadmap for different audiences has greatly improved our communication.

Life is good

Aha! has made our product management processes so much more efficient. Keeping all of our product data in one centralized location is saving us time and effort in so many ways. We now have a funnel of ideas that feeds directly into our prioritization process and informs our roadmap.

We no longer spend time manually creating roadmaps and reports because Aha! does that for us. It is such a valuable communication tool for product managers!

We have eliminated countless hours we used to spend creating presentations since we can now quickly fine-tune our communication according to the audience. Executives want a high-level overview of how strategic initiatives are progressing. The implementation team wants to see how what they are working on fits into the bigger picture. And our customers want to understand our vision and what to expect. Using Aha! for planning, we can now provide the right level of detail, while ensuring consistency across all of our roadmap views.

Aha! gives everyone on our team access to the same up-to-date information. Meetings are now more efficient. We spend less time discussing status and more time having meaningful discussions about strategy and how to keep moving forward. We are focused on delivering initiatives that matter most to our customers and that provide the highest value to our business.