How we make informed product development decisions using Aha! Ideas and Aha! Roadmaps

Jerimiah Rudden

Senior Manager, Product Strategy and Operations

We had a problem

We provide cloud-based solutions to help companies deliver exceptional customer experiences. So it follows that we want our own customers to receive the best possible experience too. A big part of this is being transparent about our roadmap and listening to what our customers want.

Previously we struggled to keep customers informed of what was coming and when. It was a long and arduous process to compile information, manually build a roadmap, and then keep it up to date as plans evolved. We had duplicate data stored in different places — including spreadsheets, PowerPoint, and Jira — so there was no easy way to make sure statuses were accurate. This made it challenging for teams to stay aligned on plans throughout the product development process.

We wanted to improve the way we manage customer feedback. We serve more than 11,000 customers of all sizes and industry verticals — making it difficult to understand the needs of different groups and assess the true demand for feature requests. There was not an easy way to keep customers informed of progress.

Aha! as a solution

We implemented Aha! Roadmaps with the Ideas Advanced plan to centralize customer ideas and product information. This allows us to streamline our entire product development process — from the moment a customer shares a request all the way through to delivery.

Our ideas portal makes it super easy for customers to share feedback. And it gives us valuable insights into which requests are the most popular. We also use the integration with Salesforce to better understand who is asking for what. This helps us analyze different customer segments and make data-driven prioritization decisions.

We now have built-in customer research tools at our fingertips — including a dynamic idea submission form, polls, and segments — to help us better understand our customers' needs.

Once we promote an idea to our roadmap, we link every feature to a corresponding epic in Jira. This keeps information in sync between both systems — so product and engineering can collaborate seamlessly as work moves from planning to implementation. And customers are automatically notified of status updates.

Life is good

Genesys customers can now see the direct correlation between the ideas they submit and the features we deliver. This gives our community visibility into what is coming and when and shows that we are listening to their needs.

Implementing Aha! software has been a sea change for our team. We are now more focused than ever on delivering product value — for our customers and the business.

We love how quickly we can build roadmaps and reports. With all of our data in one place — and in sync with other systems — we no longer waste time manually entering information and checking that everything is accurate. We can create different views for different audiences in minutes and easily share them with internal and external stakeholders. This results in a time savings of at least 30% — not to mention the benefits that come from improved collaboration and visibility.