I think most SaaS onboarding advice skips the hardest question

A lot of onboarding advice says some version of “reduce friction” or “get users to the aha moment faster.”

That sounds right, but I think it skips the hardest part: most teams have not actually defined what the aha moment is.

Not as a vague sentence like “the user understands the value.” I mean something more concrete, like:

- What action proves the user has reached first value?
- What setup step is necessary vs just nice to have?
- Which empty state should teach, and which one should push action?
- What should happen when a user stalls halfway through onboarding?
- What metric tells you onboarding is working besides “completed signup”?

The mistake I keep seeing is treating onboarding like a tour of the product instead of a compression problem. You are trying to compress the path from curiosity to proof.

One small exercise that helps: write down the first useful outcome your product can create, then delete every onboarding step that does not directly support that outcome. If the user needs education, put it exactly where the confusion happens, not in a generic welcome flow.

I found this onboarding flow prompt/checklist useful for forcing that thinking into a structured audit:
https://aipromptslibrary.sh/prompts/onboarding-cro-flow-designer-b8c27136

Curious how other SaaS founders define this. Do you measure onboarding by completed steps, activation event, time-to-value, or something else?