We identified in this recent issue that game changing product workflows have the following characteristics:
A clear Trigger Moment
Many “A ha” Moments (covered below in this post)
Stay far away from the Line of Ambivalence
Almost never fall into the Drop Off Point
Unleash a spectacular Value Payoff (covered in this recent issue)
To recap, the Value Payoff is the ultimate feeling of the customer saying either “This was worth it!” or, “This wasn’t worth it.”
The “a ha” moment happens within the workflow, and teases the Value Payoff at the end of the workflow. Typically, they happen at milestones of the workflow, but can happen at steps as well.
A Real Life Example of a Product “A ha” Moment
Sydecar is a company that helps Tundra Angels with our deal execution.
Before we started using Sydecar, our deal execution for each investment was incredibly painful. We had several things to do take investment commitments from the investors, create an LLC, create a bank account, and engage with the accounting firm to get our investors loaded up so that the K-1s could be distributed each year. I would call those the milestones of the workflow.
Within each milestone, there existed was a host of steps. For example, within the bank account milestone, I needed to contact the bank tell them we were opening an account, send a Excel file to all of the investors asking them to complete sensitive info, make sure each one sent that to the banker… get the wire instructions, distribute that in a sensitive manner… once the wires were being sent, track down to make sure every one sent theirs in… It was no joke to say that the entire workflow of executing a deal was an immense administrative burden.
But above all, executing investments was a very isolating experience for me.
Enter Sydecar, which does all of the heavy lifting so that there is little manual work required on my end for deal execution.
While executing my first deal with Sydecar, I still remember the product “a ha” moment. It happened when I received this email below. 👇
This was the product “a ha” moment for me.
My immediate feeling? “Oh my gosh, I’m no longer alone in executing these deals.”
Furthermore, I literally thought, “I now have a deal execution team supporting me.”
The thought that I went from feeling isolated doing the manual admin process largely by myself to having a deal execution team that pushes the process along was a game-changer.
This feeling of “no longer being alone” was a line of demarcation for me in how I executed deals.
Then what did I think next? “Wow, executing deals like this is going to be awesome!”
An “a ha” moment could happen within the product, or it could happen in the within the surface area of the entire experience.
From a user perspective, “A ha” moments are critical moments of progress. They are like emotional fuel that keep the user moving sequentially to the next milestone of the workflow.
If go jogging for exercise, the “a ha” moment is when you get to the top of a steep hill. You feel accomplished. You feel good. And you get emotional fuel to continue to take on the next part of the run.
The power of an “a ha” moment is that it often acts as a line of demarcation for the user by teasing the Value Payoff.
👇 Here is what is very important 👇
✅ As an investor, knowing the power of a product “a ha” moment, I pay attention to where the product’s “a ha” moment lies.
I know that the placement and location of the “a ha” moment in a workflow makes a critical difference if a new workflow will be adopted or if the existing status quo workflow will prevail. ✅
And yet…
Most startups that I see, the product workflow does not have an “a ha” moment for the user.
Or, the founding team does not know what the product’s “a ha” moment is.
Don’t make these mistakes.
To drastically increase the odds of the startup changing existing workflows to the workflow of the startup’s product, “a ha” moments are needed.
In the next issue, we’ll discover how to design “a ha” moments in your product and/or product experience to hack behavior change.
