How we got into a well-documented team rhythm thanks to Aha!

Bruce Johnson

COO & Co-Founder

We had a problem


Our product team needed a single “source of truth” for everyone in the company. There was no cohesive way for everyone on our product team to view FullStory’s product roadmap, see when the next releases were coming, or view features that rolled up to each release. This disconnect made it tough to explain how the features we built would enhance strategic goals — and even tougher to create a team rhythm. We balance Agile practices with multi-release forethought — but without a unified way to manage product, we struggled to maintain this balance. Eventually, we found it tough to separate the long list of what we might do from the shorter, curated list of what we will do.

Aha! as a solution

Aha! guides you to think through and document your strategy, goals, and initiatives to define the “true north” for where your product is headed. Crucially, the tool also encourages transparency. This allows you to share your product vision with your cross-functional team in one place for everyone to access. Having done that, you do not need to also publish this vision elsewhere and risk it getting lost or going unseen.

Aha! is the best tool I’ve seen for helping PMs and developers (and even executives) mind meld. Having tried and discarded at least a dozen tools claiming to do what Aha! does, I was astonished at just how thoughtfully coherent, comprehensive, and customizable Aha! is. And because they’ve tightly integrated so much of what a product team needs in one app, we can all just stay in Aha! rather than jumping around amongst a cobbled-together assortment of disparate tools. It’s a real productivity boost.

Features in Aha! can be connected to larger, multi-release initiatives. This helps you cross check whether you are putting your energy into efforts that support high-level initiatives. Most importantly, this allows you to explain to your team why you all are focusing on specific efforts.

Life is good

The customizable release schedule templates in Aha! make it easy to design a process that works for our team and reliably repeat it across many releases. A well-documented team rhythm greatly reduces communication friction and meeting overhead.

Most troubles among product teams come from poor communication and a lack of vision. Aha! helps product teams know where they are going — and that is an incredible feeling.

Aha! also has a well-defined place for Ideas (things we might do) that are separate from Features (things we will do). This helps us track customer requests and seamlessly graduate them to real development efforts with a single click (vs. unstructured copy/paste across disparate tools).