How we standardized our product work in Aha! Roadmaps

Anna Murray

Director, product management

We had a problem

We manage an incredibly complex product portfolio. It includes hundreds of products spread across three business units, many of which were added through acquisitions. Our offerings are grouped into product lines and managed by more than 40 product managers. Prior to using Aha! Roadmaps, each team worked in its own way and used different tools. This made it challenging to share information and align our plans.

There were three key challenges that we wanted to solve: First, we needed a better way to coordinate release plans and manage cross-product dependencies. Second, we wanted to establish a central place for managing customer feedback. And third, we needed a consistent approach for creating roadmaps.

We used to build roadmaps manually in PowerPoint and store them wherever we chose. This process was not only time-consuming, but also resulted in each team communicating its plans differently — leading to a disjointed experience for both customers and internal teams.

Aha! as a solution

Aha! Roadmaps is now our central tool for product management. We set up a workspace hierarchy that matches our organizational structure, with levels for business units, product lines, and individual products. This gives each team a dedicated space to manage its product plans, all while enabling us to see how everything ties together across the portfolio.

We tailored Aha! Roadmaps to support what we call our "Rocket Liftoff" approach for defining, planning, and launching releases. We created workspace templates to drive standards across teams. And we implemented workflow approvals to support our stage-gate process for getting sign-off at key steps in the process.

Our product organization now works in a truly unified way. We capture all our plans in one place, and we all follow the same product management process — providing an unprecedented level of visibility and consistency.

From there, each team defines high-level initiatives that support its overall product OKRs. We then review customer feedback in Salesforce alongside internal suggestions in our ideas portal to prioritize what to implement. Once we promote those items to the roadmap, we group work into epics and create roll-up releases to coordinate releases across multiple products. Lastly, we use the Jira integration to send work to the development team, keeping everyone in sync on priorities and progress.

Life is good

Aha! Roadmaps has truly transformed how our organization works. Internal stakeholders — including leadership and other internal teams — are thrilled with the real-time visibility they now have into the roadmap. Reports and dashboards give everyone the updates they need to move forward with their own plans, saving the product team a ton of time in the process. We also love how quickly we can create roadmap presentations for customer meetings.

Now, we can create different roadmaps for various audiences in minutes. Instead of being stressed when we need to provide an update at short notice, we take pride in being able to quickly showcase our plans.

Better still, we have achieved significant productivity gains since implementing Aha! Roadmaps. Each product manager saves at least five hours a week on manual tasks — which adds up to 10,000 hours a year across the organization. The pace of our business will only continue to increase, so having this time back enables us to focus more of our effort on releasing new functionality.

We are especially appreciative of the support we received from folks on the Product Concierge team. Their expertise has been instrumental to helping us set up our account and apply product management best practices. This enabled us to put the right foundation in place from day one to achieve long-term success.