3 steps to identify your product AHA Moment

7 min readMar 13, 2024

In this post, we’ll dive into the essence of the Aha Moment, why it’s crucial for product managers, and how you can lead your users straight to it.

You’ll learn a 3 steps framework to identify products’ Aha Moment and you’ll also find some strategies to lead you customers to that moment.

What is the Aha Moment

The Aha moment, in product management, is that instance when a user comprehends the value proposition of a product.

It signifies the point at which users understand how the product can address their needs or solve their problems.

Benn Stancil, of Mode Analytics, describes the Aha moment as the set of actions that distinguishes users who perceive value in the product from those who do not. This realization prompts users to continue engaging with the product, setting the stage for retention and loyalty.

During this moment, users experience four key outcomes:

They gain a clear understanding of how the product can benefit them.
They tangibly experience the core value proposition of the product.
They accomplish a task quickly that would otherwise have taken considerable time.
They feel compelled to continue engaging with the product repeatedly.

Why does it matter?

Understanding and leveraging the Aha moment is crucial for product managers because it drives user activation and retention.

Lead your users to their Aha Moment as quick as possible by defining specific and strategic user journeys

Here are several reasons why the Aha moment is important and why you should lead your users to this moment:

Reduce Time to Value: By clearly demonstrating the product’s value proposition, Aha moments simplify the activation journey reducing the time it takes for users to recognize the value of the product. Thereby increasing the likelihood of user adoption.
Increase Customer Loyalty and Retention: When users experience the Aha moment and recognize the value of the product, they are more likely to become loyal customers and advocates. Retained customers who consistently experience value are also receptive to upsell messages, leading to increased revenue through expansion opportunities.
Boost Revenue: Retained customers who experience value consistently are receptive to upsell messages because they have a proven track record of deriving value from the product. This increases expansion revenue and contributes to the overall growth of the business.
Enhance User Experience: Identifying and optimizing Aha moments allows product teams to improve the user experience by addressing user needs and pain points effectively. By understanding the key moments that drive user satisfaction, product teams can optimize the product experience to meet user expectations and preferences.
Drive Conversions and Prevent Churn: Aha moments play a crucial role in driving conversions by simplifying the activation journey and ensuring that users recognize the value of the product early on. Additionally, by fostering customer loyalty and satisfaction, Aha moments help prevent churn and retain customers over the long term.

Identifying and optimizing Aha moments empowers product teams to enhance the user experience, drive conversions, increase customer loyalty, and ultimately contribute to the overall success of the product and business.

Some Aha Moment examples

Use these examples as an exercise of understanding: (1) which is the aha moment (2) why that one specifically (3) how does the user get there

Some examples from top companies, as we saw on this post, are:

Airbnb

Making a booking for the first time.

Why?
Until then, users don’t quite get how the App works and can’t see its full potential compared to a regular hotel stay.

How do they do it?
Providing the best user experience in their site/app allowing user to easily do succesful searches to find the desired location in few clicks.

Canva

Creating the first professional-looking design

Why?
Users can see how simple it is to create logos, designs, covers, etc., with Canva’s editor, even without any design experience.

How do they do it?
One of Canva’s winning cards is leveraging Templating. This is, providing to the users many starting points for any project they may want to do to kill the friction to begin a new activity.
Canva does a great job with that.

Now try to think about these ones yourself

Facebook: connecting to 10 friends in 7 days.
Slack: exchanging up to 2,000 messages with team members.
Uber: finding a ride within X minutes.
LinkedIn: doing X connections in Y days.

Identify your Aha Moment in 3 steps

Three steps to find you Aha Moment(s):
1. Talk to users (power users and churned users)
2. Gather data and look for patters
3. Identify and test potential behaviours

1. Talk to users (power users and churned users)

Start of talking to your users. This step will allow you to build up your mind, make assuptions and build an understanding based on real feedbacks.

Power users:

When talking to power users, your objective is to uncover what constitutes a success story for this user segment. Pose these questions and carefully consider their responses as they will help you pinpoint the exact Aha Moment.

How do you use our product?
Are there specific features you utilize more frequently? If so, how do you use them?
Are there features you seldom or never use? If yes, why?
What aspect of our product do you appreciate the most?
What motivated you to use our product/subscribe/make a purchase?
What enhancements would you like to see?
Which competitors did you evaluate against us?

Churn users:

Be prepared for negative feedback. Think on how this input can be leveraged to further refine the user experience.

What objective were you aiming to accomplish when you signed up?
Were you able to achieve that objective? If not, why?
Why did our product fail to meet your needs?
How could we have modified our approach to encourage you to remain with us?

You can gather this data with emails, surveys, calls, meetings, in-App surveys etc.

2. Gather data and look for patterns

The goal of this step is to gather more analytical data from your product and match it with the data coming form user interviews.

We want to find patters and confirmations on what was expressed in the surveys. We build our hypothesis from here.

Now dive into product data.

Visualize the user journey using a funnel and monitor user actions at each stage of the journey. It’s crucial to closely monitor drop-offs, identify friction points, and observe patterns in important metrics such as activation and retention rates as they evolve over time.

Clear your data from outliers.
Look for patters that make your users coming back over and over to your product. Look for retention.

Cohort analysis could help you understand better your user base and its behaviours. This will highly depend on the complexity and maturity of your product.

3. Identify and test potential behaviours

In the last step we have to test the hypothesis built in the previous steps. Most likely you should conduct A/B tests by dividing your users into segments and presenting them with different journeys in your product.

Consider the following scenario:

Hypothesis: The pivotal moment for users occurs when they engage with a specific feature of your tool.

Experiment: Conduct an A/B test by presenting a control group with the existing setup and a treatment group with an incentivized action to reach usage and adoption of that feature.

Outcome: Track various metrics to collect data that either supports or refutes your hypothesis. This information allows you to determine the next steps, such as displaying more tailored content for new users or implementing alternative strategies for existing customers.

An example could be Airbnb.
Our assumption could be that users have their aha moment after their first booking. We want to test this by improving onboarding and/or search experience and/or activation strategies.

Guide Users to Their Aha Moment

Now that you now where you want to lead your customers, you have to decide how to do so. Probably in the AB testing phase you already found out some possibile optimisations in the journey.

Here are some options:

Personalise users journeys for different type of users

Canva and Netflix are two good examples.

Both of them ask users questions during the onboarding. In this way, they understand what to show to the users later in the App and let them experience a customised journey to reduce activations efforts.

Use interactive onboarding to help users realize value

Slack is another example of a great onboarding. In general this is more for non-marketplaces App.

When users first engage with your product, they encounter its interface for the first time, which can be overwhelming, especially with complex B2B platforms.

To help new users navigate setup and features, consider implementing interactive walkthroughs, onboarding checklists, and product tours. These tools guide users through initial onboarding, reducing overwhelm and starting their journey to proficiency.

Minimise friction in the user experience

AirBnB and Hopper do a good job.

Both of the platforms don’t overwhelm users with questions, information, details but simply let the user do what he/she is there for: make a booking.

In both of the Apps, the user is free to do any searches and eventually create a new account among the purchase moment, or after it, to avoid blocking it.

The end!

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Our mission: offer clear insights and resources based on real experiences for both newcomers and seasoned professionals.

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