Aha! radically improved our idea management
Jonathan Ross
Director of Product Management
We had a problem
Our product team previously used several disparate systems with varying degrees of success. This included trying to use Jira to manage our roadmap and future work — which it is not made for. We came to the conclusion that we needed more transparency into our work. Other teams, including engineering and marketing, needed to see what we were working on. More importantly, they needed to understand why our work mattered to their own teams as well as the organization.
Aha! as a solution
The ideas portals in Aha! solved our visibility problem. We can create as many ideas portals as needed and set them to public or private. Users in each portal can up-vote ideas that they want to support. And when the status of an idea changes, everyone who interacted with it receives email updates. This includes notifications when ideas are promoted to features. We all have more informed, ongoing conversations about ideas as a result.
The level of detail in Aha! is also a huge plus. The ability to track goals and initiatives down to the feature and requirements level is amazing. It gives us all a clearer picture of our product team’s progress. This results in a lot less stress and fewer questions about what is being prioritized. Finally, since each goal and initiative ties back to our product strategy, there is a clearer understanding of why certain goals and initiatives are pursued over others.
Aha! enabled us to organize our product efforts more effectively than ever before. It is built to support what a product manager needs; centralizes our workflow; and keeps us out of several disparate systems. I also love the integration with Salesforce for idea management.
Finally, Aha! met all of our security requirements (ISO, PCI, EU & US Safe Harbor, SOC1-3). This is not easy for a cloud-based tool, and speaks volumes about Aha!
Life is good
Idea management has improved by 100%. I mean this in the most literal sense, as we did not really do this prior to Aha! Now that we have a tool to manage ideas at a high level, we are able to achieve more than I ever thought possible.
Aha! surpassed all of our expectations. It helps us practice agile product management and work on what truly matters most.
This empowers us to work more lean than ever before by organizing work based on what matters most. And the increased clarity for releases is amazing. We are done managing releases in four systems. Now, we only use one tool — Aha!