How our team became more in sync than ever thanks to Aha!

Kevin Kidd

Product Director

We had a problem


Building and maintaining aggregate roadmaps was never easy for us. Since the product team gathers insights from so many other teams, we had to collect, vet, and foster large volumes of ideas. To make this even tougher, we had no system where we could review these ideas, discuss their value, and make decisions about what to do next. This, combined with competing interests from different teams, always took over. The resulting gridlock delayed the process of building our roadmaps. We were also tasked with formulating product plans that had redundant systems and local files. These were always hard to maintain, which lead to even more delays. Delivering product releases on time and within budget sounds like a simple goal. But when you don’t have strong resources to automate your workflow process, this is an ambitious task.

Aha! as a solution

The roadmap functionality in Aha! sold me on it. After years of looking, I was shocked to find a product that addressed a pain point I had struggled with for most of my career. Imagine my delight when I also started using the Ideas portal to capture all feedback from the teams that I work with – I had found a tool to solve both of my main pain points! After years of manually using different tools to try and capture feedback, I could finally integrate all ideas using one system.

Aha! continues to introduce effective ways for me to formulate tangible product plans accessible to the company.

Now, anyone on any team can submit ideas about how to improve Mercatus. The upvote feature allows me to crowdsource them all, determine which ideas will achieve high-level objectives, and implement them accordingly. And thanks to the Strategy/Releases/Features in Aha! there is no more doubt about product development. Aha! has made us much more process-oriented and organized our workflow.

Life is good

Our teams at Mercatus are more in sync than ever before. Now that we all use Aha! for product development, team collaboration is easier. This is especially true when it comes to engineering; we complete our product planning in Aha! and integrate it with Jira. This means that there’s little back-and-forth between the product and engineering teams.

Aha! keeps our roadmaps on track so we can delight our teams and customers alike.

I used to spend so much time formatting ahead of each release. Now, I am able to invest my time in planning each release to make sure that we exceed expectations. We want to do more than build a minimum viable product; now, I have the time and resources to take Mercatus to new heights.