Aha! keeps all of our stakeholders informed automatically

Fidel Zawde

VP, Product Management

We had a problem


Agile is only as good as requirements facilitation across the company. We could not communicate to all of our different teams using Jira and Confluence. It required a lot of manual discussions, writing requirements, and tasks in different systems. More importantly, it had a poor impact on our capacity and roadmap planning. We could not quickly review features and define estimates to build our roadmap and timeline — especially when trade-off decisions were required. Excel was our best way to handle this work. But product managers know that Excel is far from ideal, especially when you must communicate features to external partners, customers, and various dev squads.

Aha! as a solution

Aha! is a central place for all stakeholders to review each release, where we are in development, and which action items / dates are required to close out the delivery. Capacity and release planning is easier than ever. Previously, we had thousands of tickets in each Jira project. Typically, 30% would be ready for engineering to develop, 40% would still be in the requirement gathering / iteration phase, and the remaining 30% would be tasks for engineers to complete.

Our tools before Aha! were more of a problem than actual solutions. With Aha! we can finally combine the effort to define / iterate on roadmaps with communication to internal stakeholders, customers, and development squads. And while doing all of that, we can work on defining detail requirements for engineering. One tool solves all three problems with a very simple interface.

With Aha! the product team does not have to publish our 40% until they are complete. This means that Jira is now 100% focused on what is ready to develop or fixing bugs. This saves us all a lot of confusion about which stage of development each project is in.

Life is good

The ease of adding features, sub requirements, and to-do lists in Aha! is amazing. It allows us to quickly communicate features across groups, add the action items required to finalize each feature, and move things around quickly. The ability to add estimates per feature, story, and to-do dates allows us to quickly review overall capacity and where we are against the plan.

Now, all product stakeholders are informed instantly of updates and changes throughout our product planning. I can’t overestimate how impactful this is.

We are also able to separate the roadmap and definition process from execution. Previously, we would use Jira to manage requirements, scoping, and execution — which was very messy. Since Aha! allows us to define features and then push complete versions to Jira, we are able to separate the two.