Hubris: The Quiet Enemy of Great SaaS and MarTech Product Experience
After years in SaaS and MarTech, a troubling pattern emerges across companies of every size. Teams begin to talk about customers as if they are obstacles rather than partners. Clients are described as confused, careless, or incapable. Decisions are framed around how users should behave rather than how they actually do. This mindset rarely appears in public messaging, but internally it shapes product decisions in subtle and damaging ways.
This is not confidence. It is hubris. And in product-driven businesses, hubris is one of the fastest ways to degrade user experience.
Most SaaS and MarTech platforms are built by people who live inside the product every day. They know its architecture, its edge cases, and its history. Over time, that familiarity creates an illusion: if something makes sense to the team, it should make sense to everyone else. That assumption is almost always wrong.
Your Customers Are Not Trying to Learn Your Product
Customers do not wake up hoping to master your interface. They are not paid to understand your system. Your software is one tool among many, used intermittently, often under pressure, and rarely with full attention.
To customers, your product exists for one reason: to help them complete a task so they can move on to the next responsibility in their day. They do not see the elegance of your data model or the cleverness of your workflows. They see friction, speed, clarity, and outcomes.
When teams forget this, they begin to mistake confusion for incompetence. In reality, confusion is simply an unmet expectation.
Expertise Creates Blind Spots
Product expertise is a double-edged sword. The deeper someone’s knowledge of a system, the harder it becomes to see where it fails newcomers. Steps collapse into muscle memory. Labels feel obvious. Navigation paths feel natural because they have been reinforced hundreds of times.
This is why internal reviews so often miss usability problems. Everyone in the room already knows how it works.
The real test comes when someone—even a knowledgeable, technically capable person—is asked to perform a task without preparation or context. Suddenly, what felt simple becomes ambiguous. Options are unclear. The next step is uncertain. Progress slows or stops entirely.
These moments are not evidence that users are incapable. They are evidence that assumptions have replaced empathy.
There Is No Wrong Way to Use a Product
One of the most damaging ideas in SaaS is that users can use a product incorrectly. In practice, users only reveal how a product communicates or fails to.
If customers consistently bypass features, repeat steps, misuse fields, or invent workarounds, they are telling you something. They are showing you how the product reads from their perspective. Treating these behaviors as mistakes shuts down learning. Treating them as signals opens the door to better design.
Great products do not require users to think like product managers or engineers. They guide behavior naturally, making the correct action feel obvious without explanation. When a product demands training to avoid failure, the design has already lost.
Understanding Customers Does Not Require Complexity
Learning how customers actually use your product does not require expensive research programs or months of analysis. It requires proximity.
Ask customers why they did something a certain way. Watch them use the product without interrupting or coaching. Pay attention to hesitation, backtracking, and abandonment. Those moments matter more than feature requests or satisfaction scores.
Testing should not exist to confirm that the team was right. It should exist to reveal where the team was wrong.
When customers are involved early and often, something important happens. Internally, the language changes. Teams stop asking why users don’t get it and start asking why the product failed to communicate clearly. That shift is cultural, and it compounds across roadmaps, releases, and support interactions.
Products Are Not Built for Experts
It is tempting to design for the most advanced users because they look like you. They speak your language. They ask for powerful features. But experts are the minority.
Most customers will never reach deep mastery, and they should not need to. A successful product delivers immediate value at a basic level and rewards deeper engagement over time. Complexity should be discoverable, not imposed. Power should feel optional, not required.
When companies design primarily for themselves, they unintentionally push everyone else away.
Key Takeaways
- Expertise creates blind spots: The more familiar a team is with a product, the easier it becomes to miss where users struggle.
- Customers are task-focused, not product-focused: Users care about outcomes, not how elegant or complex the system behind them may be.
- There is no dumb usage: Repeated confusion is always a design signal, never a user failure.
- Observation beats assumption: Watching real customers use your product reveals issues no internal review will catch.
- Complexity should be earned: Powerful features belong behind clarity, not in front of it.
- Hubris erodes trust and adoption: When teams blame users, products stagnate, and customers quietly leave.
- Great products make users feel capable: Success is measured by how little a user has to think, not how much they learn.
Hubris Always Has a Cost
Hubris rarely announces itself. It hides behind jokes, assumptions, and dismissive language. But over time, it shows up in metrics: slower adoption, higher churn, increased support burden, and longer onboarding cycles.
The irony is that expertise is meant to serve users, not judge them. The best teams fight their own familiarity. They assume nothing. They design as if every interaction might be someone’s first and only experience with the product.
In SaaS and MarTech, humility is not a soft value. It is a survival trait.
If SaaS and MarTech companies want to build products people truly love, the first thing they must eliminate is the belief that users are the problem.
