What’s your biggest product challenge?

Common product challenges and how to overcome them with the right UX strategies

Photo of Mariana Morris
Mariana Morris Founder & CEO
17 Mar 2025

Building and maintaining a successful digital product isn’t easy. Teams often face roadblocks that slow progress, create inconsistencies, or lead to wasted effort. The key to overcoming these challenges is understanding their root causes and applying the right UX and product design strategies.

Let’s explore five common product challenges and how to solve them.

1. Lack of clear product direction

Without a clear product strategy, teams struggle with misalignment, decision-making bottlenecks, and shifting priorities. This leads to inefficiencies, delays, and frustration across departments. The root cause is often a lack of shared understanding between product, design, and development teams.

The solution

A well-defined product strategy ensures teams have a shared vision and roadmap backed by research and data. The key steps include:

  • Defining clear business goals and aligning them with user needs

  • Conducting discovery research to uncover opportunities

  • Establishing a prioritization framework to avoid distractions

  • Communicating strategy effectively across teams

By bringing clarity and focus, a strong product strategy accelerates decision-making and helps teams stay on track.

Learn more about Product Strategy

2. Disjointed digital experience

Users expect seamless experiences across their end-to-end experience, from the moment they start the process through to when they complete their tasks, whether they’re using a website, mobile app, or other platforms. If your product feels inconsistent or clunky, engagement and retention suffer. Common problems include:

  • Inconsistent UI patterns across platforms

  • Lack of continuity when users switch devices

  • Disruptive navigation or interaction inconsistencies

The solution

A user experience (UX) design approach that prioritizes consistency, efficiency, and accessibility. This involves:

  • Creating cohesive design patterns for a unified experience

  • Conducting user testing to identify pain points across platforms

  • Mapping user journeys to ensure smooth transitions between devices

  • Iterating based on user feedback to refine interactions

A well-designed digital experience increases user satisfaction, reduces frustration, and builds brand trust.

Find out how to create seamless experiences

3. Development team losing time reinventing the wheel

When development teams frequently rebuild UI components or struggle with inconsistencies, productivity takes a hit. Without a structured design system, teams waste time fixing repetitive issues instead of focusing on innovation. This leads to:

  • Slower development cycles due to redundant work

  • UI inconsistencies that hurt the user experience

  • Increased maintenance effort and higher costs

The solution

A design system, a centralized library of reusable components, design guidelines, and code standards, streamlines development and enhances collaboration. Benefits include:

  • Faster design-to-development handoff with reusable components

  • More consistent UX across products and features

  • Reduced technical debt by preventing one-off design decisions

Implementing a design system empowers teams to work more efficiently while delivering a polished, user-friendly experience.

Discover how to create a Design System

4. Usability issues affecting conversions

Poor usability directly impacts user engagement, conversions, and customer retention. Users who struggle to navigate your product or complete key tasks are more likely to abandon it. Common issues include:

  • Confusing navigation and unclear calls to action

  • Accessibility barriers that exclude certain users

  • Slow or unintuitive user flows that cause frustration

The solution

A usability and accessibility review identifies pain points and areas for improvement through:

  • Heuristic evaluations to spot usability flaws

  • Accessibility audits to ensure inclusivity for all users

  • User testing to gather feedback on interactions

  • Data-driven recommendations for optimization

Improving usability enhances the user experience, reduces support costs, and boosts conversions.

Learn how to refine the usability and accessibility through reviews

5. Limited design resources slowing product improvements

A lack of UX resources can lead to product stagnation, with updates taking longer than necessary. Teams often struggle with:

  • Insufficient UX research to guide decisions

  • Overloaded designers juggling too many projects

  • Difficulty scaling UX efforts as the product grows

The solution

Scaling your UX capacity ensures that design is not a bottleneck but a driver of continuous improvement. This can be achieved through:

  • Expanding the UX team strategically to meet the demand

  • Embedding UX processes into agile workflows

  • Leveraging external UX partners for specialized expertise

  • Fostering a UX culture where design is valued across teams

Your product can evolve faster and more effectively with the right UX resources.

Learn how to scale your UX team

What’s your biggest product challenge?

Every digital product faces challenges, but with the right strategies, you can turn these obstacles into opportunities for growth. Which challenge resonates with you the most?

Let’s start a conversation and find the best way forward.

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About the author

Mariana Morris

Mariana is the Founder and CEO of Fruto, a UX leader with over 20 years of experience leading design teams, shaping UX strategies for complex applications, and driving human-centred innovation.

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