Build the right things. Build the things right.

9 tips on how business leaders can reduce product experience and tech debt driving positive impact for customers.

David Martin Updated on Aug 24, 2025

Introduction

Unchecked product experiences and technical debt silently drain millions from organizations every year straining productivity, inflating support costs, and eroding customer trust. Leaders often celebrate feature velocity or visual polish, but if teams aren’t solving the right problems or building solutions the right way, the result is wasted investment.

This article outlines nine proven practices to build the right things, build them right, and reduce both product experience and technical debt. Each practice connects directly to measurable business outcomes: higher ROI, faster time-to-market, reduced costs, stronger customer retention, and sustainable growth.

01: Building & maintaining customer trust

It's difficult to build trust with customer decision makers and customer product users & even harder to maintain. What's important to ask yourself as a leader is:

Are your customer sentiment scores (OSAT, NPS, etc.) stagnating or dropping?
Is product leadership really (and I mean really) listening and taking timely action on customer feedback?
Are sales cycles becoming longer & longer? Or stalling all together?
Is the team delivering on what customers and product users need in a timely manner to meet goals?

If so, these are signs that pivots should be made rather quickly.

02: Clarifying context

When sales, pre-sales, CX support come back to the team with customer comments stating that the experience is "poor". What can the team actually do with such generic feedback?

Is the experience poor because of language?
Fragmented tasks?
Technical bugs?
Redundancy?
Error handling?

It's critical to determine the deeper context of what those general statements really mean. The next steps are to implement a strategic customer research program to understand all the primary tasks product users are performing when they encounter those experiences, where in the actual journey issues occur and how frequently.

Customer feedback loops - Through leveraging user research for customer observations and validation of prototype proposals early & often, teams can catch miscommunications, semantics errors, early confusion points before spending costly dollars and time on development. Using a scoring method such as 1-10 confidence score voting, can quantify how close the solution is to early indicators of impact or if more iteration is needed prior development.
Customer co-creation opportunities - Bringing customers closer to guiding the future of the product either virtually or onsite promotes collaboration and generates buy-in. This results in building stronger partnerships and guiding a product in a direction that customers can truly believe in...because they contributed to it.

Cost Analysis

Let's review a quick example to illustrate 94% savings in organizational cost for a new experience improvement initiative.

01: Test Cases

14

Points tested in validation

02: Gaps Uncovered

8

Test case points identified needing iteration

03: Test Result

53%

Issues caught prior to development reducing UX/tech debt

04: Cost Before Development

$2,500

Estimated cost calculation: 5ppl x $50/hr x 10 days

05: Cost After Development

$39,000

Estimated cost calculation: 13ppl x $50/hr x 60 days

06: ROI Savings

94%

Potential organizational cost savings per initiative: (AFTER/BEFORE - 1)

03: Saving effort & time

There is much pressure to demonstrate outputs quickly & on time. However, what are the true costs of misses on customer impact? There are several reasons customers will & continue to pay high dollar for products & services.

By understanding the current state and improving complex user journeys to reduce time on tasks & amount of steps to complete, product users can perform their job faster & more accurately with less mistakes.

Reducing steps

"Steps" are defined as every interaction a product user must take to complete a primary task or a "Job-to-be-done" (J2BD). Below is a before/after breakdown realizing 57.8% reduction in steps for a common persona task.

01: Before

45

Captured steps during user observations to complete a common task BEFORE

02: After

19

Captured steps of the proposed solution for same task AFTER

03: ROI

57.8%

Reduction in steps to perform the task (AFTER/BEFORE - 1)

Reducing time on task by team member

Below is a before/after breakdown realizing 60% reduction in time for a common task or J2BD.

01: Before

25m

Average product user time on task

02: After

10m

Average product user tested time on task

03: ROI

60%

Reduction in time on task per team member: (AFTER/BEFORE - 1)

Reducing time on task for entire team

Below is an example realizing 37,125 hrs of team time savings, creating impact on organizational efficiencies.

01: Task Count

5

Average number of times this task is performed by a team member per day

02: Time Spent

75 min / 1.25 hrs

Average number of mins per day spent on task: (25m - 10m) x 5 per day

03: Team Size

135

Average number of team members in the same role within the organization

04: Total Hours Saved Daily

168.5 hrs

Number of team hours saved per day: (1.25hrs x 135ppl)

05: Total Hours Saved Monthly

3,375 hrs

Number of team hours saved per month: (1.25hrs x 20 working days/mo x 135ppl)

06: Total Hours Saved Yearly

37,125 hrs

Number of team hours saved per year: (1.25hrs x 20 working days/mo x 11 months/yr x 135ppl)

04: Saving money

Below is an example model illustrating a 17.5% operational cost savings.

Reducing operational costs

01: Team Member Yearly Hours

1760 hrs

Average # of hours team member works per year

02: Headcount Savings

21 ppl

Number headcount freed up to support sales and/or operational savings (total hours saved / average team member hours - 1)

03: Team Size

135

Average number of team members in this role within the organization

04: Annual Salary

$75,000/yr

Average salary for persona role in North America

05: Yearly Operational Costs

$9m

Example value for organization operational costs

06: Operational Cost Savings

$1.58m

(salary x ppl)

07: ROI

17.5%

Reduction in organization operational costs (savings /current total - 1)

05: Increasing revenue

With that improved time savings, your product users free up a percentage of time to focus more on upselling opportunities. Leveraging some theoretical calculations below for demonstration, no matter which number changes, the growth potential is visible. Below is an example realizing a 6% increase in monthly revenue.

Increasing revenue

01: Time Savings

3,375hrs

Monthly team member time savings

02: Customer Follow-up

40

Average # of customer sales follow ups that can be performed by each team member per month

03: Close Rate

30%

Average percentage team can close

04: Sale Amount

$450

Average amount team member sells per customer

05: Total Monthly Upsells

$5400/mo

$1200

Previous average cost per ticket

02: After

$900

Current average cost per ticket

03: Cost Reduction

$67,500/mo

Reduction in monthly CX operational costs

04: ROI

25%

Reduction in monthly CX operational costs

Takeaways

When leaders commit to building the right things, and building them right, they unlock trust, agility, and long-term value for both customers and the business.

Define & shape business OKRs around customer needs so team is aligned
Capture current state stats of product or service experiences for each task, or "Jobs-to-be-done" (J2BD)
Explore experience improvements for each J2BD
Validate internally with SME's and with Customers to determine readiness or if more iteration is needed before costly PI development
Speed to market is dependent on the flexibility of a modern tech stack and governance of a mature design system
Shout successes from the mountain tops and consistently share with executive leadership & customers so they feel the impacts

Communicate

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