How we increased team efficiency using Aha!

David Howe

Product Manager

We had a problem

Our product planning needed help. We constantly had too many product features and projects that were pending approval. At the same time, we struggled to keep all of our business owners updated regularly. This was due in large part to inefficiency tracking projects as they moved through a complex workflow. Dev work was only tracked in Jira. We all used so many different tools, but had no central place to work across teams.

Aha! as a solution

Today, we track every project as a feature in Aha! and identify them via an initiative (specifically, a quarterly goal that we are working towards). Now, it is very easy for our executive team to understand what we are considering and why. This helps us establish priorities quickly as we gauge and weigh costs vs. benefits. Aha! notebooks are also a huge help. By building notebooks from our dashboards and project status feeds, it’s very easy for us to send out updates on-demand. This empowers our team to quickly confirm where things stand.

After test driving dozens of product management solutions over the last three months, we have found Aha! to be the perfect blend of everything we need without overdoing it.

The workflow in Aha! is complex enough to be flexible for our organization’s very unique needs. At the same time, it feels intuitive and familiar. By customizing our workflow in Aha! and integrating with Jira, our PMs do not need to double-up on their work. Instead, we are able to plan, think, and collaborate in one place throughout a project’s lifetime.

Life is good

Aha! has given us hours of time back. Prior to using it, we didn’t realize how much time we were wasting due to lack of coordination between teams. Using Aha! decreased the overlapping parts of our workflow process. This has saved our product team up to 50% of our time in software. Now, we can focus on leading product and building what matters. We have also reduced the need for executives to get too far into small details. Now, we use Aha! to send them just the information they need to make the right business decisions for projects as quickly as possible.

Many tools in the product management space don’t offer enough power and flexibility. Or, they offer so much that the overhead of using it negates its purpose. Aha! really is that perfect balance. It keeps our annual and quarterly goals front and center while we all focus on what we can build next.

Finally, we have cut the number of reports sent to team members and time spent in Jira by half. Now, we combine those efforts at project kickoff strictly into Aha! This allows us to pass planning efforts to Jira via the two way integration.