How Aha! helped us operate in a more transparent way

Jared Johnson

Director of Product Development

We had a problem

BuildTools started as a home-grown tool to support our custom construction business. We soon discovered a larger market demand for our product and decided to launch BuildTools as its own business entity.

Prior to using Aha! at BuildTools, we relied on our deep understanding of the construction industry to decide what to build. But with more than 900 ideas stored in a Google Sheet, it was difficult to know where to focus. We had no easy way to validate our ideas with customers and no logical prioritization process. We also struggled with setting expectations about what we could deliver and when. As construction management experts, we had a lot to learn about managing a software product. We quickly recognized the need for a purpose-built product management tool to help us plan for the future and keep delivery on track. Aha! was the obvious choice.

Aha! as a solution

We use Aha! to consolidate our product backlog and plan releases for the upcoming year. Our entire team works remotely, so having a centralized location that everyone can access makes it much easier to collaborate on our roadmap and set realistic delivery expectations.

Aha! is vital to the long-term success of our product. It is the de facto product management solution. No other tool even comes close.

The ideas portal helps us to better organize our feature requests. We have imported all of our internal ideas and will soon make the portal available to customers. This will allow us to test our ideas externally, validate the direction of our product, and provide a more transparent customer experience.

Previously, we struggled to accurately estimate what we could deliver and when. Aha! helps us rationalize what is possible based on the team’s capacity and create a roadmap that we can execute with confidence. We also use the integration with Pivotal Tracker to stay in sync with our development team. This allows us to prioritize and define features in Aha! and manage the implementation in Pivotal Tracker — without losing visibility into the status of the work.

Life is good

We selected Aha! because it is the only complete product management solution available. It gives us a clearly defined framework for managing our product while also letting us customize our process flow.

We value the responsive approach that the Customer Success team at Aha! provides. We know that there is a team of product management experts available to help us anytime we need it.

We now operate in a more organized and transparent way. The ability to see all of our product information in one place keeps us aligned around our long-term vision and helps us make the right decisions to get there.

Aha! also makes it easy to communicate our plans and respond to feedback. Our customers and internal teams appreciate our open and responsive approach — and we spend less time explaining what we are working on.