We have started thinking more strategically because of Aha!

Maria Kirgan

Senior Director, Product Management

We had a problem

Our product team lacked a standard template to communicate our strategy and roadmap. Without a centralized tool to manage these, it was hard for us to keep our product stakeholders informed of where we are headed and why. This was compounded by the fact that not every product manager had a yearlong roadmap due to a lack of long-term strategic product goals. Many members of our team focused on planning release by release — which often meant we were building features that had no higher value. We had no way to quantify the value of these features — or receive and manage user feedback. Without a centralized solution to collect internal and external feedback, we started to worry about where we were headed.

Aha! as a solution

Aha! provides the standard template for product and portfolio-level roadmap views that we always needed. Now, each product manager is required to have product strategy, goals, and initiatives defined before any features are built. This helps our whole team build what matters most while erasing irrelevant features from our product backlog.

Aha! keeps our product managers focused on what is important now and tomorrow while making it easy to communicate this information to all our stakeholders. The tool brings transparency to our roadmap prioritization process and allows for alignment with our business partners.

We also established ongoing roadmap review sessions with internal stakeholders. This allows us all to review priorities and ensure ongoing alignment. Thanks to the transparency that Aha! provides, these sessions have had a huge impact.

Finally, the Aha! Ideas portal serves as our solution for managing and prioritizing new product ideas. Our team uses the portal to make product ideas available to all end users, both internal and external. We can create as many portals as we need; set each one to Public or Private; and allow users within these portals to upvote and comment on each submitted idea.

Life is good

Aha! promotes teamwork and collaboration like no other tool that I have used before. The increased dialogue about roadmap priorities has yielded more engagement between our team, stakeholders, and customers.

Aha! will also shape how we engage our users moving forward. Using the Aha! Ideas portal is the beginning of our innovation strategy execution. As we see more adoption and activity from this channel, it will increase how often we can listen to the market.

Using Aha! has given our team the discipline we need to think strategically.

High-value user suggestions will inform our roadmap priorities — no matter who submits these suggestions. This will create a more democratic process and ensure that everyone contributes.