How we brought our entire product development team together
Jennifer Lange
Product Owner
We had a problem
Our division manages a portfolio of thirteen products — each with a dedicated product management and engineering team. Previously, each team used a different tool to plan and track their work. Product management has been using Aha! Roadmaps for a long time now to set strategy and plan what to build. But engineering used Jira to coordinate sprints and manage the development process. This created a disconnect between planning and implementation.
We struggled to keep both teams in sync. Engineering lacked clarity on what features to prioritize in each sprint to achieve our release goals. And product management needed better visibility into development status. This meant the team spent hours manually tracking down updates and fighting fires rather than moving our product strategy forward. We needed a way to bring both teams together to collaborate seamlessly and empower everyone to do their best work.
Aha! as a solution
We now use the complete Aha! suite of tools to manage our end-to-end product development process. We do our strategic planning in Aha! Roadmaps, capture customer feedback in Aha! Ideas, and manage the implementation of new features in Aha! Develop. This enables all of our teams to work together in one centralized system — giving us unparalleled visibility into what is happening.
Aha! provides a 360 degree view of product development — so we can rally around our goals, show what we are doing to achieve them, and track where we are in the process.
Aha! Roadmaps is foundational to our success. We define strategic objectives at the company level and link them to goals and initiatives for each product. This enables us to align our plans and give everyone in the division — including upper management, engineering, marketing, sales, and support — clarity into the direction of the portfolio as a whole.
Capturing customer feedback via an ideas portal has been a game changer. It gives us deep insights into what our clients want — and gives them a voice in our planning process. We implemented the Ideas Advanced plan to take advantage of additional customer research tools. For example, we can now publish a rolling roadmap in our ideas portal so clients can see what is coming and what recently shipped. And we love using feedback polls to proactively ask questions and get quantitative insights.
Once we have prioritized features based on product value, we assign them to the right team in Aha! Develop to build. The backlog management pages make it easy to see product and technical work side by side so everyone can agree on priorities. Engineering can then plan sprints based on each team's capacity. As work gets underway, the status of features in Aha! Roadmaps auto-updates — keeping everyone in sync.
Life is good
Managing our entire product development process in Aha! provides a new level of consistency and transparency. We have standardized our workflows at every step of the process and use templates to ensure repeatable success. We also use notes to document best practices — so everyone follows the same approach. As a result, our team works together more effectively.
We can now report on product development progress 25x faster than before — saving us hours of work manually mining data to understand status.
A major part of our success is the Aha! Product Concierge team. Aha! exemplifies what it means to have exceptional customer service — providing super fast and thoughtful responses to our questions. Since everyone is a former product manager, it feels like we are working with an extension of our own team. The Complete Product Experience is outstanding.
