How Aha! helped us scale to product management maturity

Shri Iyer

Vice President of Product

We had a problem

The legal operations industry is rapidly growing and evolving. As the first platform to modernize legal operations management, we have been fortunate to experience high-speed growth. We had to quickly expand our teams to meet customer demand. But we did not have defined processes and the ownership across teams was unclear. Each team was siloed using different tools for their own needs.

We knew defining product management practices and maturing as a team was essential for sustainable business growth. We needed a central place to define repeatable and scalable processes so our product teams could focus on the "why" and engineering could focus on the "how."

We also needed a better way to capture customer needs. We were using another tool to gather ideas from our customer support team, but it became a black box because we had no way to connect ideas to our roadmap. It was challenging to see a full picture of the backlog to prioritize ideas. We wanted to create a seamless experience for submitting and tracking ideas through to delivery — as well as a unified understanding of our goals and what would be worked on next.

Aha! as a solution

We chose Aha! because it provides a clear framework for our product management workflows — from high-level strategy definition to release planning and reporting on progress. The bidirectional integration with Jira ensures data is always up to date so Aha! is truly our single source of truth.

Idea management is centralized with Aha! too. Our internal teams submit requests via a private ideas portal, giving us a secure way to gather feedback. Integrating our portal directly with Zendesk means that we can quickly convert a support ticket into a new idea or link it to an existing one. We also love that other teams like sales and customer success can add proxy votes to ideas on behalf of customers.

We are now far more empathetic to our customers' needs. Aha! helps us crystalize and understand real pain points, rather than hypothesizing.

Aha! is inspiring a fundamental change in the way we collaborate. The reports we create increase transparency into the product roadmap. And presentations make it easy to share updates and progress with the broader team. Now everyone across the company has a reliable resource to reference when they have questions.

Life is good

Our product management processes are entirely streamlined. We have reduced the number of tools that we use from five to one. This means valuable time is saved from constantly updating data and reports. And providing status updates for every idea our teams share from customers lets them know we are actively listening and prioritizing, even when we cannot deliver their requests right away.

A key part of our success is the Aha! Customer Success team. We get super fast responses to our questions with thoughtful answers and solutions. Since they are all former product managers, it almost feels like they are an extension of our own product management team. The complete product experience is outstanding.

We gained the respect and trust of the entire organization. They now understand the strategic value of product management and the reasons behind the decisions we make.

Today everything runs out of Aha! — from product feedback to tracking progress on current features and sharing reports. We finally have a solid foundation to mature our product management discipline.