Best practices for product operations teams

Aha! Roadmaps

Fully adopting Aha! software can transform your entire organization. By standardizing workflows, teams can collaborate to build better offerings more efficiently. But as product operations teams know, it can be difficult for organizations to adopt new tools — especially when this requires learning a software suite with robust functionality.

This is why our Customer Success team developed a set of best practices to help product operations teams adopt and successfully use Aha! software. Whether you are just getting started with Aha! Roadmaps or are looking to improve a specific operational function at your organization, read on for comprehensive advice to help you succeed.

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Set business and product goals

Encourage product managers to align their product roadmap with broader business objectives. This helps ensure everyone is working on shared objectives that drive genuine value for the organization. Here is an overview of how product operations teams can support this process:

  1. Align with leadership: Meet with leadership regularly to understand and review high-level business objectives. This helps you support product managers in aligning their efforts with overarching company goals.

  2. Set goals: Guide product managers toward setting specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals that are tied to business objectives. Once product managers add these goals to their workspace, they can link all associated work to these goals. Roll up workspace goals to higher hierarchy levels to show the relationship between product goals and company-level strategy. This helps every product team member understand how their work contributes to the organization's success.

  3. Identify initiatives: Support product managers in identifying initiatives that will help achieve the product objectives. Use a structured approach for brainstorming and prioritizing initiatives (such as the initiatives prioritization page or the 2x2 prioritization matrix). Roll up workspace initiatives to higher-level initiatives so you can visualize multiple levels of your strategy in reports.

a strategic goals chart with a goal drawer view open, showing that it is rolled up to a workspace line goal

Standardize

  • Synchronize your planning cycle and approval process for goals and initiatives with your broader organization's planning cycle. Document the process using an internal product knowledge base or workspace note. Revisit the process frequently to ensure it is working efficiently, and adjust when necessary. If the process changes, assign a to-do for everyone in your product organization to review the updated process.

  • Establish how you will capture and link strategy across your workspace hierarchy. Determine where product teams will define hierarchy goals and initiatives and which record types will link to those strategy records. This keeps data consistent and supports optimal reporting across your portfolio.

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Optimize workspace hierarchy

Your workspace hierarchy gives product teams dedicated spaces for managing their roadmaps while aligning with broader product portfolio and enterprise goals. As your product offerings grow, so can the teams working in Aha! Roadmaps. A scalable workspace hierarchy ensures effective collaboration, visibility, and product portfolio management. There are several ways you can analyze your workspace hierarchy to determine whether its structure is appropriate for your product organization:

  1. Map out the product portfolio: Create a comprehensive list of all products across your organization. You can use a whiteboard in Aha! Roadmaps to visualize this information. Group related offerings to reveal any gaps or overlaps in your offerings and gain a clear picture of your product ecosystem. Compare your product portfolio to your current workspace hierarchy. Are workspaces grouped in a way that functionally mirrors your product portfolio?

  2. Identify and engage product leaders: Because of their in-depth knowledge surrounding the product landscape, your product leaders have valuable insights that inform how you should structure your workspace hierarchy. Their involvement ensures your workspace hierarchy aligns with the overall product strategy. Make these product leaders workspace owners in your Aha! account, as they are responsible for implementing their roadmaps in their respective workspaces.

  3. Consider dependencies: Identify how various products relate to one another and which teams collaborate frequently. This will help determine a logical structure that facilitates smooth communication and efficient workflows.

You may find it appropriate or necessary to reorganize (or even restructure) your workspace hierarchy. Do so mindfully — moving a workspace can impact user permissions, workspace settings, and integrations. Review our article on moving workspaces to a new workspace line for more insights.

a features board with the workspace dropdown open showing a workspace hierarchy. Fredwin Cycling is selected

Standardize

Develop a process for updating your workspace hierarchy when you add or deprecate products. For example, you might create a workspace note in Aha! Roadmaps where you can define criteria for adding new products, establish a review process for workspace changes, and create a checklist for deprecating and archiving old products. Customize a workspace template to apply the same settings to each workspace — so you can standardize terminology, workflows, and automations across workspaces. This will help you maintain consistency and prevent your workspace hierarchy from becoming cluttered or disorganized over time.

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Establish a product development framework

Your organization's development framework serves as a guiding light — everyone in your product organization uses it to understand exactly how teams collaborate to deliver work. Capture your framework in a parent line workspace where everyone can easily find it. Here, you can define and diagram your product development methodology to align your product organization around processes, standardizing how you work. Consider the following recommendations to put an effective framework in place:

  1. Understand how teams work today: Conduct a thorough assessment of existing processes, tools, and methodologies across different teams. Observe each team's workflows and talk to individual teammates to gain more context. Create a whiteboard with all workflow statuses side by side so you have a deeper understanding of how each team works.

  2. Find commonalities: Recognize shared processes and methodologies among teams. This helps you establish the foundation for a unified framework that resonates across the organization.

  3. Build out your framework: While on your workspace line, navigate to Knowledge -> Frameworks and coalesce the information you have gathered. You can build your own framework or start from the tried-and-true Aha! Framework for product development and cater it to your product organization. This gives product teams a visual guide to reference to enhance their understanding.

  4. Document best practices: Provide best practices to your teams that address both strategic planning and day-to-day work. Use workspace documents or even build out an SSO-authenticated knowledge base to share this information broadly. Include strategic planning processes, product workflows, communication protocols, prioritization practices, resource allocation protocols, and more. This empowers product managers with proven standards they can employ for better product outcomes. Consider using Aha! best practices and product management guides for inspiration.

a Frameworks page with the Aha! Frame work selected

Standardize

Once you establish your framework, you will better understand how to define records in your Aha! account. Then, create record templates, customize record layouts, and apply other configuration updates to use Aha! Roadmaps records in a way that best supports your framework.

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Define reports

Data empowers teams to measure their success and make better product decisions — and gathering and presenting data is vital to a team's success. Your product operations team's role in this is to make reporting across your product organization consistent. This ensures stakeholders receive standardized, easy-to-read reports. To establish efficient reporting practices, consider the following:

  1. Identify report owners: Assign ownership to foster accountability and consistency. Report owners are responsible for building, maintaining, and sharing reports, so they should be familiar with reporting functionality and have a deep understanding of the data they present.

  2. Understand business needs: Stay familiar with the needs of both leadership and working teams. Frequently revisit roll-up goals and initiatives, considering what data product managers need to drive daily activities and which metrics are essential for leadership to make strategic decisions. Brainstorm ways reporting could potentially empower cross-functional collaboration. Then, tailor your reports to provide actionable insights.

  3. Establish reporting time frames: Consider which reports will be needed when. For example, you may need short-term progress-tracking and tactical updates weekly, trend analysis and goal alignment monthly, and strategic reviews and long-term planning quarterly. Just be sure to align your reporting cadence with your organization's planning and review cycles — so the right information is available at the right time. Consider scheduling emailed reports so they send right when everyone needs them.

a Fredwin Cycling product dashboard with several reports, including a strategic roadmap, initiative progress list table and a features by initiative pie chart

Standardize

Create templates for product roadmaps, feature and initiative progress, and strategic alignment reports that product managers can start from. This ensures folks can easily compare reports across time periods — giving everyone a more accurate picture of progress. It also helps new team members get up to speed quickly on reporting formats and practices. Instruct each product team to create dashboards with standardized reports so everything is visible in one place.

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Identify champions

Product operations teams play an important role in empowering product managers to be their best and help their teams achieve value. To nurture ownership and engagement from product teams, find key individuals within each team who possess a deep understanding of Aha! Roadmaps. These are your champions — they play a critical role in supporting their colleagues. When you empower champions to bolster their teams, you ensure consistent and optimal usage of Aha! Roadmaps and drive adoption across your organization.

  1. Find thriving teams: Look for product teams that already excel in their use of Aha! Roadmaps. (Using reports and team dashboards can help you identify teams that work most efficiently.) These teams will likely have a tidy workspace with up-to-date information in their documents, reports, and records.

  2. Identify natural supporters: Find the individuals within those high-performing teams that already play a supportive role. These are likely to be team members who frequently answer colleagues' questions or share best practices. If you have a large organization, consider collaborating with workspace owners to identify these individuals.

  3. Establish communication channels: Set up dedicated channels for champions to communicate with, coach, and support other users. You can regularly schedule meetings or even set up Slack or Microsoft Teams channels for this purpose.

Standardize

Define the role of the champion and document how you will bring champions together to support one another.

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Provide ongoing training

Aha! Roadmaps provides your product organization with immense value for teams that fully embrace it. One way to help is to provide continuous learning opportunities for your product teams to keep everyone aligned:

  1. Develop a comprehensive team onboarding program for new product managers.

  2. Hold regular workshops and collaborative sessions to share best practices and align around new processes.

  3. Regularly audit workflows and reports to identify where additional training will be helpful.

  4. Consider enrolling champions and administrators in Aha! Academy's Administration of Aha! Roadmaps course. This class provides administrators with advanced training on topics we have touched on in this article, like setting up the ideal account structure for your products, establishing standards and workflows, building sophisticated reports, and more.

Standardize

To best support your product team, create an internal product team knowledge base that details your organization's standard workflows, processes, and practices.

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