How Aha! helped us better communicate our product plans

Ryan Bergstrom

Chief Product Officer

We had a problem

Our platform provides a complete offering of HR solutions. We have a large team of product managers, product owners, and designers continuously working to improve the customer experience. Important product information — such as roadmaps, customer ideas, and feature backlogs — were captured in Excel and PowerPoint. This made it difficult to connect individual product plans with the overall business strategy. We also lacked a consistent prioritization process. There was no uniform way to determine if a new feature was a strategic fit and if it mattered to customers. We wanted a better way to connect our product information and guide our decisions.

Aha! as a solution

Aha! gives us a centralized place to define our strategy and build roadmaps With the high-level vision and goals for our platform articulated, product managers can then build roadmaps that align with the overall direction.

The ability to capture ideas and roadmaps in the same system keeps us focused on what customers actually want. This makes it easier to prioritize what to build. It also lets us show how we are delivering customer value. We can add prioritized ideas directly to our roadmap — which means we can seamlessly incorporate feedback into our strategic planning process.

Aha! empowers product managers to make roadmap decisions with confidence. We now have a clearly articulated business strategy that links to our implementation plans. This keeps everyone focused on delivering customer value.

We quickly implemented Aha! across our entire product team. We also configured the two-way integration between Aha! and Microsoft TFS. This keeps us in sync with engineering so we can track development progress in real time.

Life is good

Managing all of our product information in Aha! provides a new level of transparency. Now, we have a single strategy that is easily accessible and clearly defined. This ensures that our product teams plan ahead more effectively and make trade-off decisions with confidence.

Aha! solves the complexity of keeping more than 30 teams aligned around a single strategy. We are able to move forward in a unified way and deliver greater value to our customers.

Aha! also makes it easy to communicate our plans with others. We can now quickly build the right roadmap or report and share it across the entire organization. This saves time that would have previously been spent hunting for the latest version of the sanctioned roadmap.