How we brought clarity and scale to enterprise product management

Jennifer Waller

Vendor Portfolio Manager

We had a problem

Sage serves millions of customers worldwide — and we continue to expand our portfolio across HR, accounting, payroll, and financial management solutions. As our product organization grew across different business units and regions, the need to maintain a centralized view of all global activities increased.

Product information, roadmap deliverables, and voice-of-the-customer feedback were often siloed and updated manually. This presented an opportunity to roll up information across portfolios and share strategy and progress.

Aha! as a solution

Aha! Roadmaps brings our product strategy, customer feedback, prioritization, roadmapping, and delivery plans together in one place — giving our teams a shared source of truth. It scales with our organization, supporting multiple teams and products without forcing a one-size-fits-all approach. This flexibility made it easier to drive adoption and enablement across our global product organization.

Aha! software gives us a consistent way to align strategy with execution across teams. We can see what matters, make better decisions faster, and ensure everyone is working toward the same goals.

We now align plans from the outset — linking team initiatives directly to business unit priorities. Business leaders have self-serve access to portfolio- and initiative-level roadmaps (and other reports) so they can track progress against our strategy.

Ideas portals have also transformed how we capture and organize customer feedback. Product managers can review requests as part of the strategic planning process to make informed decisions about which features to prioritize. From there, we use the integrations with Azure DevOps and Jira to hand off work to engineering and eliminate manual duplication.

Life is good

We now have a single system of record for managing product delivery — improving transparency, data quality, and alignment across teams. Leadership can clearly see the evidence and assumptions behind every decision. And product management teams can explain not only what they are building, but why.

We now have certainty about where to invest because product decisions are grounded in strategy and real customer insight.

Sage uses what we call a "champions model," empowering local experts within product areas to share progress updates versus depending on a small central group. We have saved countless hours previously spent on manual reporting (plus, leadership can get the updates they need in real time). We have also streamlined how teams use and manage tools, introducing greater consistency across the organization. The return on investment is clear: Teams spend less time managing processes and more time delivering customer value.