Lead With Data: Hacking Team Motivation With “A-ha!” Moments By Kim Thuy Tu Kim Thuy Tu Sat 11:57 PM Good evening everyone. My name is Kim. Thank you for having me here today. Before I get into what a-ha moments are and how you can use it to hack your team’s motivation, let me give you a little bit more background

but first, a little about me Kim Thuy Tu Sat 11:59 PM At first I was going to create a collage of my interests but then I realized… that’s what social media is for. Looking at my instagram profile here, you can probably guess that i enjoy photography, traveling, visiting cafes,

i’m an airbnb host Kim Thuy Tu Sat 11:59 PM I’m also an airbnb host so when I’m not taking photos for Instagram, I am hosting travelers and taking photos for them to put on their Instagram. This is usually my chance to meet new people and show them

i studied psychology Kim Thuy Tu Yesterday, 12:09 AM I studied psychology in college. At the time, I was planning to pursue medicine and if you had asked me whether I thought that I would be standing here today giving a talk on design, research, and data,

i write (sometimes) Kim Thuy Tu Yesterday, 12:14 AM I’m also a writer… sometimes. The last article I wrote was at the time of my career change and it it was a case study on redesigning instagram. After publishing this case study and having it read by many people, one of them being the founder of Christina’s, he pretty much convinced me to pack my bags and move to Saigon to become the

! ✈ # Kim Thuy Tu Yesterday, 1:23 AM and i did

Currently Kim Thuy Tu Yesterday, 12:27 AM and here I am today working at Christina’s, a fully-integrated travel experience company that aims to provide amazing local experiences to travelers. We provide everything from accommodation, experiences, food & beverage, and transportation. So when I came in as the second product designer

Color matching
 Onetrip’s helmet Kim Thuy Tu Yesterday, 12:30 AM From helmets for our tour guides,

Designing
 Airbnb coasters Kim Thuy Tu Yesterday, 12:31 AM to coasters for our homes across Vietnam…

Photoshopping Airbnb’s 
 CSO onto a standee Kim Thuy Tu Yesterday, 12:32 AM to creating standees for our co- hosted event with Airbnb…

Photographing a 
 6:00 run Kim Thuy Tu Yesterday, 12:32 AM to running and photographing at the same time…

Developing Christina’s 
 first chatbot Kim Thuy Tu Yesterday, 12:32 AM to building out our first ever chatbot…

and then finally
 “redesign this” Kim Thuy Tu Yesterday, 12:33 AM to redesigning our entire message app..

Challenge 
 accepted

Kim Thuy Tu Sat 7:36 PM which then inspired the development of an entire fleet of host technology

Kim Thuy Tu Sat 7:36 PM and product teams.
 
 Today I want to walk you through a couple of examples of how I was able to find and use these aha moments throughout the product development process to motivate my team and grow our products to the size it is today. Hopefully by the end, you will be able

What are “A-ha!” moments? Kim Thuy Tu Yesterday, 12:54 AM So what are aha moments?

Kim Thuy Tu Yesterday, 12:54 AM To give you some perspective, The first ever mention of aha moments dates back to over a 100 years ago and since then 


Kim Thuy Tu Yesterday, 8:25 AM …there has been a ton of research on what it is and how it works scientifically.

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Kim Thuy Tu Yesterday, 8:19 AM Two things that all these research can agree on are that aha moments creates a positive emotion with us and it happens on the right side of our brain where our creativity and insights processing are located. but that doesn’t tell me much. What I want to know is: how I can use these aha moments to invoke those very same positive

realization inspiration insight recognition comprehension

“let me see” Kim Thuy Tu Sat 7:45 PM let me see

“have you tried…” Kim Thuy Tu Yesterday, 8:59 AM and started to play with the app himself and explaining to the user how it should work

“i’ll fix it” Kim Thuy Tu Sat 8:28 PM and when it didn’t, he said ‘i’ll fix it’ even though it wasn’t his responsibility. 
 
 After this, Thuyen started to join a couple more of the beta sessions and even lead one of them himself, because this aha moment lead him to see the difference between developing via his simulator and testing a product in real life.

‘A ha!’ moments can spark motivation & ownership Kim Thuy Tu Yesterday, 9:17 AM That brings me to this. A ha moments can spark motivation and ownership.

Kim Thuy Tu Yesterday, 9:18 AM To create more of these aha moments, I would allocate time during our weekly team meeting to share any interesting data points or insights I found from looking over our analytics. It could be anything from an increase in retention, app sessions, or number of daily active users.
 
 After sharing these data with my team, I found that there is a heightened sense of motivation and work satisfaction because it helps them realize the value our product was delivering to our users.

Kim Thuy Tu Yesterday, 9:18 AM More importantly, I make it a point to recognize specific team members for their craftsmanship and contribution. When this happens, i find that the engineers on my team will take it upon themselves to look over their own feature and polish them up without needing any prompt from me or a bug report.

Kim Thuy Tu Sat 7:46 PM The last story I want to leave you with involves one of our intern, Huseyin. Huseyin is a very curious and eager intern. After joining our team, huseyin was tasked with developing a feature to help our hosts communicate easier and faster with foreign guests. After months of development and countless hours of refinements, the feature was ready to be shipped. After we launched the feature, I checked over our data to see that a couple of people had already started to use it and so I relayed the news back to him. Visibly excited, he asked “who was it? what did they write? what language was it?” Kim Thuy Tu Yesterday, 9:55 AM The next day Huseyin came to me after looking over each of the data point. He found that some of our users were sending translated messages to guests that didn’t require a translation. At first we thought it was a bug but after investigating further, we realized that it was due an oversight during development. Luckily he caught and corrected it in time because if he didn’t we would have probably ended up paying more than doubled or tripled

Observe Acknowledge Share The ‘A ha!’ moment hack Kim Thuy Tu Yesterday, 9:21 AM So today we learned that aha moments can spark motivation and ownership.
 
 Here are the 3 step hack I created for sparking more of these moments within my team:
 Observe the data and your team, and find opportunities to involve them in the design process Acknowledge and praise the positive behaviors you want to reinforce And lastly — Share. Share the insights and aha moments with your team, so that you can stay inspired and motivated together.

Thank you