You Found Your Aha Moments—Now What?
You’ve done the hard part: you’ve brainstormed and identified your product’s aha moments, those moments that will hook your customers and get them coming back to use your product.
Nice work.
Now comes the fun part—actually putting them to use.
Here are a few simple, actionable tips to help you get real value from the exercise.
1. Rank Your Aha Moments by Strength
Not all aha moments are created equal. Some are tiny sparks, others are lightning bolts. Start by ranking them:
Is it big or is it small?
Is it immediate or delayed?
Does it drive stickiness or just a smile?
The strongest aha moments are the ones that require the least effort to reach but deliver the biggest “wow.” These are gold. Prioritize them.
2. Design Onboarding Around Your Strongest Aha
As you’re crafting your onboarding experience—emails, in-app prompts, calls, whatever—keep those aha moments right in front of you. Print them out if you need to.
Your job is to guide users toward the strongest, lowest-effort aha moment first. That early win builds momentum. It’s like getting your foot in the door. Once they’ve felt the magic, you’ve earned the right to ask for a bit more time, a bit more engagement.
After that, you can guide them toward those higher-effort moments. But start simple. Start sticky.
3. Watch for the Unexpected
Think of your aha moments as living parts of a broader framework—not just a static list.
Pay close attention to the ones you didn’t plan for. The ones that emerge organically. Users will often show you value you didn’t know you were delivering. Take the time to talk to your users to discover these.
I was just chatting with a founder from a Y Combinator-backed company. They built their product for engineers. But they noticed an unexpected customer aha moment, where customer success teams were using it in a totally different way. That insight? It led to a full pivot—and a whole new growth curve.
The takeaway: your aha moments might not all come from a whiteboard. Some will come from your users, in the wild. Be ready to catch them. Unprompted feedback for your clients is one of the best ways to not only discover new Aha moments, but also validate that those moments you hypothesized as strong aha moments are indeed real.
(Bonus Tip)
4. Use Aha Moments as Success Milestones
Once you know your aha moments, turn them into milestones that your team tracks. For example:
Did the user complete X action?
Did they reach Y insight?
This gives your CS team early indicators of success—or red flags. If a user isn’t reaching those key moments, it’s a signal to intervene early. You can build playbooks and processes around these, e.g. "user did not use x feature/tool and did not reach y aha moment, send them automated email reminder with customer case study.
