Aha! supports all of our portfolio planning processes

Ram Tulasi

Senior Product Manager, Mobile

We had a problem

Building product roadmaps is not an easy task. And revising roadmaps is even harder. These were consistent challenges for our product division. We needed a tool to help us build and revise roadmaps with ease. We also needed to align these roadmaps with our product strategy — and improve visibility on cross-team product roadmaps. These tasks present a big challenge to a global organization like ours. Our goal was to have the whole product division working within the same tool — no matter where they were in the world.

Aha! as a solution

We noticed several immediate benefits once we started using Aha! It allows us to communicate across our product team with ease. We can assign to-dos, comment on features — all from right within Aha! This helps keep our team out of email, where messages are easily lost. The fact that the Feature boards integrate with Jira is essential for us because once our features are well-vetted, we can send them over to Jira and get updates automatically.

At Concur, we love the visibility and structure Aha! brings to the discipline of product management and roadmapping. In addition, product owners can now easily publish reports to various key stakeholders. This reduces redundant, time-consuming tasks while enabling our leadership to make solid decisions.

The deep sync between Aha! and Jira is essential to reporting to the business. The pivot table reports are also an enormous help; there is no need for us to use Excel anymore. Now, our whole product team uses pivot table reports to display our work. And the Release roadmaps capture dependencies across teams.

Aha! helps each team working on our products connect their work back to high level strategy. This is challenging for any team, but can feel impossible for a large multinational organization. We tried to solve this problem in the past by using a wide range of tools — which only made things harder. I can’t overstate how refreshing it is to see at a glance what everyone is working on and how their work is driving towards our strategic goals. Having us all work within the same tool gives everyone much more clarity.

Life is good

Now there is no reason to spend the weekend preparing slides for the big review!

The fact that Aha! supports our entire product portfolio — and visualizes how all of our work rolls up to strategy — is a testament to what this tool can do.

All of our product management work is done, shared, and revised in Aha! This allows us to create custom views of our roadmaps for whoever needs to see them.