Aha! helped bring more transparency to our product plans

Rehana Nathwani

Senior Global Product Manager, Healthcare Informatics

We had a problem

Capturing feature requests from the many global regions we serve was difficult. The lists for enhancements and requests lived in emails or Excel sheets. Not only did the many different lists make it difficult to keep track of requests, but they never contained all of the information we required.

We built our product roadmaps in PowerPoint presentations that became outdated only minutes after they were created. There was no single source of truth, and different iterations of roadmaps lived in people's email inboxes. As a result, the product development teams often struggled to understand what marketing's current needs were, and marketing had little awareness of other work that was being done. But beyond the disconnection for internal teams, the regions were affected as well. They were unable to easily see what features were being worked on and all of the details of what was in a release (marketing features and technical implementation). This meant there was a lot of additional overhead of transferring information from one place to another in an attempt to keep all the groups in sync.

Aha! as a solution

We created an Aha! ideas portal for our products and customized it with mandatory fields so that we could capture critical information about the feature request. We also set up an internal process for us to review these ideas on a regular basis and either promote them to a backlog or stamp them as "not required."

Aha! has transformed the way our healthcare informatics product teams work, giving us more transparency into plans and tighter connections to the teams implementing them.

We created roadmaps in Aha! for each platform and an overarching release roadmap that showed in one place how much we were trying to do each quarter. We created an Aha! notebook that shows all the roadmaps and shared it with key stakeholders.

We also configured the Aha! integration with Jira and enabled requirements estimates and status updates to flow back and forth.

Life is good

Using the Aha! ideas portal has been a huge improvement. We are able to capture information that we need, keep feature requests in one common place, then review and place them in an appropriate backlog.

We now have a product roadmap in one place that is visible for all our stakeholders to view at any time with no effort going into updating it. Historically, every time we had to compile roadmaps everyone had to update the PowerPoint. With the Aha! notebook feature, we don’t need to chase everyone down for updates — we can just generate the link and share the latest product plans.

Aha! gives our product teams confidence in how things are shaping up for a release and the progress we are making.

With the Jira integration, our teams gain insights into the features that have moved into development and the statuses as they’re built out. The tight integration also helps us have conversations about trade-offs, since the teams now have more insight into the work required for particular features.