How we drive product innovation with Aha! Roadmaps

Sarah Charlebois

Manager, Product Operations

We had a problem

At Surescripts, our purpose is to bring together healthcare organizations across the U.S. to provide simpler, trusted health intelligence sharing. Healthcare is complex — simplicity is essential for delivering great care. We value simplicity not only in what we do, but also in how we do it. In fact, "make it simple" is one of our valued behaviors. We strive to bring clarity to internal processes so we can focus on what matters most: supporting the needs of healthcare professionals and organizations throughout the patient journey.

True to our commitment to simplicity, our product operations team sought to refine product development processes to bring innovations to market faster. Our product roadmaps were housed in disparate systems and offline documents. Stakeholders lacked visibility into dependencies across the entire product portfolio, making it challenging to aggregate roadmap plans and drive prompt decision-making. Although most teams had visibility into departmental objectives, they lacked a broad view of priorities. This made it difficult to manage competing requests.

Aha! as a solution

Aha! Roadmaps is now core to how we run product operations at Surescripts. We use the Pragmatic Framework to guide how we build and market products, so the first step was to tailor Aha! Roadmaps to match that approach. We also made Aha! Roadmaps the single source of truth for managing our business goals so they could cascade down through every level in the organization.

When you combine great processes with great tools, that is when the magic happens. Our product organization now orbits around Aha! Roadmaps, giving us entirely new levels of strategic alignment and efficiency.

Our process starts with using an internal ideas portal to collect and triage innovative ideas that were largely informed by customer insights. If we decide to pursue an innovation, we convert it into an initiative and then fully evaluate the opportunity against our strategy. Once approved, we then define releases and features, identifying dependencies across products and teams as we go.

From there, we use the powerful capacity planning capabilities in Aha! Roadmaps Enterprise+ to balance what we want to deliver with our agile teams' availability. Once everyone is aligned with the plan, we build out detailed requirements and use the Jira integration to send work to the right engineering teams. This eliminates ambiguity about what each development team should work on — enabling us to deliver value faster and with greater efficiency.

Life is good

We are extremely proud of the results we have achieved since implementing Aha! Roadmaps. It has helped us streamline every aspect of our product development process by bringing unprecedented levels of transparency and efficiency.

We exceeded our target ROI for Aha! Roadmaps implementation by more than 250% — accomplished by saving 12,000 hours annually through automating our end-to-end roadmap process.

We created a single dashboard so teams across the organization can see what is happening at each stage of the process. Our executive team members now have insights at their fingertips in a clear, comprehensive view that informs strategic decision-making. In turn, this means our product teams can quickly align on the best approach to bring new functionality to market, faster.

This is just the start for our team. With full visibility into our processes, we are now developing baselines for how long it takes to plan, build, and launch new products and features. Our team is energized to use these as we continue to innovate with purpose, at scale, to deliver better, safer, and more cost-effective care.