How we got the whole team aligned using Aha!

Camelia Gui

Product Manager

We had a problem

Our product team organizes our backlog on a feature level. But keeping this backlog in sync with the other teams in our company was a challenge before Aha! This was because we used various tools to build and share roadmaps with our product stakeholders. As a result, important tasks like tracking business value and capacity planning were tough to monitor. There was a lack of transparency across our organization. This left a lot of folks wondering what our product team was working on.

Aha! as a solution

The Features Board in Aha! is very well organized. The high-level view of upcoming releases provides a much-needed project overview. Our team loves that the parking lot sits alongside the Features Board. We can easily drag and drop features from the backlog to releases, and vice versa.

It is also easy to do all product planning and define everything within Aha! Once this work is complete, the two-way integrations between Aha! and dev tools like Jira allow us to send our product plans to engineering with just one click. This can be achieved right on the Features Board, which allows for a seamless transition.

Aha! is a very straightforward tool to visually track progress and monitor projects. Despite the depth of what it can do, I find it straightforward to use. The UI is intuitive, which makes my job more enjoyable.

The best part is that engineering has a stronger sense of what our product team is building — and why we prioritize some features over others. This gives them a stronger understanding of our work.

Life is good

The visual transparency that Aha! provides is invaluable. Colleagues across our organization want to know how our product work relates to their own projects. When we need to point out dependencies between projects, it is very easy to do so in Aha!

Aha! has taught us how crucial it is for everyone involved in product management to use the same tool. I can’t imagine working any other way now.

The visual roadmap view within Aha! is extremely adaptable. For example, we can create different roadmap views for the marketing and engineering teams. This is important because each of these teams needs to see the product roadmap. But they also have different needs since the roadmap will impact their respective teams in unique ways. Aha! allows us to create and save as many versions of our roadmap as needed. The result is that everyone in our organization has more clarity. They can see direct links between what our product team plans and their own daily projects. This adds a new level of understanding that results in more teamwork.