Supporting one million users
Aha! creates software to help organizations plan and build products. Founded in 2013, the company’s tools—including Aha! Roadmaps, Aha! Ideas, Aha! Whiteboards, Aha! Knowledge, and Aha! Develop—help streamline the process of taking ideas from concept to market.
Chris Waters, co-founder and chief technology officer, guides innovation and oversees the Aha! engineering organization. His top priority is creating value for customers so they can deliver lovable products. A key part of that is keeping the platform running reliably and securely. “Over one million product managers at some of the best-known and most innovative companies in the world trust our product development software to capture customer requests, create visual roadmaps, and build with confidence,” says Waters. “Ensuring we always provide a responsive, available, and secure service is key to our success.”
Aha! software is designed for product managers who plan product strategy and roadmaps—so it naturally integrates with many different types of development tools. Those development tools send Aha! webhooks that enable it to stay up to date with the status of work as it’s completed. In a given week, Aha! processes more than 140 million webhooks. Aha! chose Datadog tooling to manage technical performance at scale.
Streamlining service management
Aha! began using Datadog Application Performance Management (APM) several years ago. To maintain operational excellence, the company recently added Datadog’s Service Management solution, Incident Response. These tools allow Aha! to manage workflow around APM notifications within the same platform. “When Datadog released On-Call and Incident Management, we saw the benefit of using these tools alongside APM to give engineers one place to monitor performance, schedule our rotations, and streamline our workflow,” says Waters.
Alex Bartlow, Aha! director of platform engineering, says On-Call’s user interface—which allows them to set up different rotations and escalation policies—is the best he’s ever used. He also likes that On-Call easily mapped to the way the team was scheduling previously using its own internal tooling. “On-Call basically mapped exactly to our existing processes, which was nice because those processes have evolved over many years and we were really happy with them,” says Bartlow.
“Real-time collaboration has enhanced our ability to streamline our work—and it shows with our steady cadence of two go-to-market feature releases each week.”
Finding the right expert
The Aha! team also uses On-Call to schedule engineering rotations to answer internal technical questions, such as around staging environment configuration. This allows engineers to get quick answers without interrupting everyone on the team. Bartlow notes, “The team now knows who’s responsible when, so there’s never confusion.”
Responders can also initiate a Slack channel right from the On-Call page. “The Slack integration feature is really helpful for collecting the discussions, data points, hypotheses, and eventual conclusion to a discussion,” says Bartlow. “That real-time collaboration has enhanced our ability to streamline our work—and it shows with our steady cadence of two go-to-market feature releases each week.”
Simplifying onboarding
Perhaps most importantly, the seamless integration between Datadog products means the engineering team does not need to learn disparate tools. This makes onboarding efficient too. “Choosing a tool the engineers were already familiar with was important because every new system someone has to learn is nontrivial friction in their daily job,” says Waters.
Today, Aha! has enhanced its processes for maintaining a reliable and secure platform, enabling its million-plus users to deliver great products. “Having observability and service management tools interconnected has been critical to achieving that,” adds Waters.
