Defining Aha for a multi-use case product

When Aha means something different to different types of users...

As an interim product lead working with b2b SaaS startups, I spend most of my waking hours contemplating Aha. Specifically: What is it, and how can I get more people to reach it?

What is aha, and why does it matter?

If your users don’t understand within a reasonable timeframe that the product is right for them, they’re sure as hell not coming back. In a sales-led organization that means they’ll likely cancel their contract, in a PLG setup that means no revenue and no referral (say bye-bye to that flywheel effect). 

In the graph below I depicted the common flows users can go through when using your product. The biggest lever you have to increase revenue is increasing retention, and the biggest lever you have to do that is by improving activation. 

Activation and ‘aha’

But what makes a customer an active customer? Although I fully understand the urge to count anyone who triggered any event in the last 30 days as active users just to pump up the numbers, this doesn’t correspond with whether they’ve experienced the value of your product. 

Your activation metric should be a leading indicator for retention, which makes user value an important piece of the puzzle. Rage-clicks might trigger events but they don’t mean that your user is likely to come back.

I like how Reforge breaks activation down into multiple pieces, putting ‘aha’ at the center.

For most B2B SaaS companies, defining ‘signup’ and ‘setup’ are relatively easy. The trouble starts with ‘aha’. ‘Aha’ is defined as the moment that a user or team experiences the core value of your product for the first time. This is a tough one if you’re not entirely sure or aligned on what core value your product offers, and if you don’t really know what your users came for in the first place…

I’ve been there.  

The trouble with aha and multi-use case products

Things get more tricky when your product can do a whole bunch of things for a variety of people. Consider Schmoho, a new (imagined) player in the Customer Relations space, offering a ‘one-stop-shop’ solution with a CRM, an AI-powered live chat, a mailbox, a knowledge base, and task management. 

A little thing you should know about me: I’m generally not a fan of ‘one-stop-shop solutions’. They tend to be bloated, complicated products that do a lot of things in a mediocre way, but nothing very well. The product/tech team has a complex machine to maintain, and marketing and sales struggle to come up with a concise, compelling message. The root cause is often an unwillingness to narrow down the target audience and a desire to serve ‘anyone’. 

Anyway…. Back to Schmoho. 

Should their ‘aha’ be ‘viewed 10 customer records within the first week’, ‘received and answered 5+ emails within the first week’, ‘deployed 1 knowledgebase within the first week’, or something entirely different? The team has no idea. 

The most common mistake is to mix up a setup moment with ‘aha’. 

For example, if setting up a first customer database is a requirement for being able to take any further step in the tool, it can be tempting to consider this moment ‘aha’. However, if a user has set up their first customer database, this doesn’t mean at all that they’re getting what they came for. This is dangerous, because by setting the wrong ‘aha’, we’re likely to drive new users to the wrong action, which doesn’t at all correlate with a higher chance of activation or retention. In reality, we might be able to skip the ‘setup first customer base’ step altogether. 

The trouble with Aha and team-products

Things get even trickier when we’re dealing with team products, where users with different roles are trying to achieve different goals. 

Back to Schmoho 

• We have an administrator who sets up the workspace, manages users and billing 

• We have team leaders who can approve the actions of their team members, and who get insights into their team performance in a dashboard

• We have team members who are managing the inbox, updating the knowledge base, manning the live chat, etc. 

We might be expecting the admin to be active only a few times per year, team leaders at least weekly, and team members every weekday.

Good luck setting one simple Aha now. 

Merging quantitative with qualitative data

As a Product Manager for such a team-based, multi-use-case product, you can probably come up with 10+ potential ‘Aha’ moments. The aim is to boil it down to the most likely contenders. 

The best starting point? Talking to your customers. 

Qualitative: customer discovery

• Customer interviews with paying customers who show strong engagement with your product (power users): What does your product do for them? How do they use it? You’re looking for the core value of your product in the eyes of your most important customers. At the end of the day, you want to build your product for the type of users who love it, and no one else.

• Customer interviews with new users showing engagement: “What did you come to our product to do?”; “What made you realize that our product was right for you?”

• Shadowing with non-customers who fit your ICP. This is especially a good option if you don’t have that many customers to interview yet. Ask them to share their screen during a video call and walk you through their sign-up process, starting on the landing page (“What do you think this product does?” “Is it a good fit for you?” - to using the product (“What’s the first thing you want to do?” This is likely related to their Aha.). Make sure to ask them to narrate their thoughts during the process.

• Session replays. Watch to see what your users are trying to do first (and where they struggle)

• Onboarding surveys. Simply ask your new users in their onboarding flow what primary goal they’re trying to achieve in your product. These work best after you’ve done at least 5 interviews so that you can use the words of your customers when describing the goals. You get points if the answer of the user leads to them getting a personalized walkthrough. 

• 1-question survey. For example, asking new users “What did you come to our product to do?”; “What’s the best thing about our product?”.

Collecting qualitative data might allow you to reduce your list of Aha options quite a bit, and possibly might help you decide to remove or hide a few use cases from your product to make life easier for everyone involved. 

Quantitative: working backward from your assumptions

Now that you have clear assumptions on what Aha can be, you can start digging into the data.

Create ‘target audiences’ in your product analytics tools based on the combinations of events that you believe could mean Aha, and compare the retention charts for these target audiences to each other, and to the overall customer base (control). If one of these target audiences sees far better retention than the others, the actions they performed are more likely to be your ‘Aha’.

Compare the new users that came back to your product (or even upgraded to paid) to those that didn’t. What actions are the first group taking, that the second group isn’t?

If you’re working on a team product with a different aha for each role, make sure to make that distinction in your analysis.

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Work with me? I work with SaaS startups and scale-ups as an advisor or as an interim product lead. Connect with me on LinkedIn if you’d like to chat.