When your users say, “Meh.”
A common tale for early-stage SaaS product teams
As a fractional UX leader working across many industries and sectors for most of the past 10 years, one of the most common problems I’ve seen is unbalanced product teams. Nine times out of ten, that imbalance stems from the team being tech-led—or sometimes even tech-exclusive.
What do I mean by that? Business leaders responsible for producing a digital product often suffer under the false assumption that they are building something technical. The natural next step seems to be to put some technical people in charge of creating it. This happens all the time, and it’s always the wrong move.
The right move is to first pressure-test your assumptions. What are you really building? Certainly there’s a technical aspect to the solution, but that’s only part of the story. What you're really building—the deliverable for which you are ultimately and fiscally responsible—is a set of user outcomes.
Let that sink in: user outcomes are what you're building. The tech is incidental. Yes, it’s still important, but it’s not the place to start.
User outcomes make your business outcomes possible.
User outcomes: Your users use the product, which makes them more efficient, able to provide better service, less prone to costly errors, and ultimately more productive.
Business outcome: You make more money.
Ancillary outcome: Your users feel happier in their jobs. They feel seen and heard by their employer. And if your users happen to be salespeople—or if they work on commission—they’ll likely make more money too.
It’s a win-win, right? So let’s proceed from this point.
Here’s the bad news: if your product was built without a UX leader involved from the beginning, it likely wasn’t designed to deliver user outcomes. It was designed to deliver requirements. Features. Business logic. Checkboxes.
Here’s the good news: You don’t have to start over.
You don’t need to scrap the product or replace your team. And you definitely don’t need to hire a full design department. What you need is UX leadership—the kind that can slot into your team quickly, evaluate what’s working, what’s not, and help you course-correct.
A fractional UX leader brings deep experience, pattern recognition, and speed. They can identify usability bottlenecks, misaligned flows, and overlooked user needs—then partner with your existing team to fix them. Not with fluff or theory, but with realignment to user outcomes. The kind that drive adoption. Loyalty. Productivity.
And here’s the opportunity: once your product begins delivering user outcomes internally, it becomes easier to scale. Easier to train. Easier to love. That’s when doors start to open. Maybe it’s other departments. Maybe it’s partner organizations. Maybe it's an entirely new revenue stream—licensing the product to external customers who now see the value your users are experiencing.
That’s the power of getting UX right—not just as a role, but as a strategic function.
If you're ready to turn your product into something people actually want to use—and maybe even pay for—then it's time to bring in UX. You don’t need more features. You need better outcomes.
Let’s build those.
Ticking all the boxes looks good on paper. It might even convince someone to buy the product. But it won't deliver outcomes and it won't convince people to use it, and it won't have a net positive impact for your customer. You've sold them a lemon. You've thrown a credibility grenade into their camp and it blew up in their faces. What is the lifetime value of that customer now? What impact might their word of mouth have on landing other customers?
