We increased team productivity and communication using Aha!

James Matlick

Product Manager

We had a problem

Our roadmap was built from multiple documents. As a result, we were collecting the data from different sources. That made maintaining and communicating the multiple versions of the roadmap problematic. As priorities changed, it became more time consuming and quite difficult to manage. We also used to maintain the roadmap versions in Excel. As soon as it was shared it was almost instantly out of date. Communication to management is extremely important. The tedious versioning and updating meant that the management team often saw more of the operational side of product than they needed. (They don’t see half-baked releases and things that are not quite thought through for mass audiences.) Feature management was done with Jira, a tool built for developers. This took the product team out of a product environment into a development environment. This was a problem for both the developers and the product team.

Aha! as a solution

We now have real time access to our roadmap. Today we know exactly what is being worked on now and what our priorities are for the entire business. We no longer have to communicate around versions of our product documents for our roadmap. Since everything is online, what’s there is the most up to date.

Aha! notebooks allow us to communicate quickly and easily to management. Notebooks have helped us save a great deal of time when we show the executive team our progress and priorities.

Aha! makes it easy for us to visualize and manage our roadmap. It helps the team stay focused on delivering products that are vital to continued growth.

The workflow we have now keeps the product team in Aha! Which is our tool of choice. The Jira integration is also great — the product team can push items into Jira when we are ready without having to switch tools.

Life is good

The team is more productive not having to refer to multiple documents now that we use one tool to visualize our roadmap. We also save time putting presentations together for management.

Using a cloud-based tool that offers a real-time view gives us 100 percent accuracy when we update and share our roadmap. With Aha! it doesn’t matter if we have two or four people changing our roadmap — we’re never worried that we’re losing track of important details.

Product can now stay focused on our products and use our own tools how we want, without having to deal with the dev team’s tools.