How we tell the visual story of our roadmap using Aha!

Mohammed Dessouky

Director, Product Development

We had a problem

Our product team had consistent trouble managing our roadmap. Features were not being mapped back to corporate objectives and strategy. This made it hard for us to assess what we were working on; we would constantly question why – or if – what we were building mattered to our customers and business. That is not a good feeling to have as you are leading product. These nagging doubts led to trouble creating consistent roadmaps across all product lines. We also had trouble reporting product dev status up to senior stakeholders. There was no easy way for them to see what we were working on. As a result, we spent lots of time answering questions when we could have been working instead.

Aha! as a solution

Tool adoption across teams is rarely easy. But we have 3 product managers on our team; using Aha! we were able to get all of them to manage their roadmaps through the same unified tool. Now, whenever one of us talks to upper management, the look and feel of each story is the same – regardless of the product line.

Aha! helps me manage my product portfolio from vision-down feature detail, and seamlessly ties it all together. It also doesn’t hurt that the generated roadmap and release visuals are the best that I’ve seen out there.

The visual reporting functionality and ability to publish stories through Aha! notebooks helps immensely. Now, we can easily tell a great story in meetings with upper management. The strategy summary diagram, strategic goal chart, and Initiatives chart were brilliant. And the roadmap strategy diagram visually ties objectives and initiatives to the releases that help bring them forward.

Life is good

Aha! has saved me a lot of time preparing visual charts to tell the story of our roadmap and how it helps us achieve our goals. It integrates with Jira, which makes our engineering team happy.

Aha! has helped our product team get back on track. Its ease and excellence is a testament to how badly our team needed a solution.

Now, they are seamlessly plugged into what our team is working on and don’t feel so silo-ed. Aha! is intuitive and easy to use – I was using it with my real production data within a day.