Making the Case for a New Product

The challenge

A product no one believed was needed

A B2B SaaS business had a mobile gap. The prevailing assumption across many departments was that their customers — desk-based business owners managing finances — would naturally want to work from a desktop.

But the reality was different. Their customers were predominantly microbusinesses. Mobile-first SaaS was already part of their daily lives. And the research data — user tests, tracking studies, discovery sessions — told a consistent story: a mobile app was the number one requested feature.

The challenge was twofold: make the internal case for building it, then understand the need well enough to build the right thing.

The approach

Building the evidence from the ground up

Desk research & competitor analysis

Established the market context — how mobile had evolved in business finance, what competitors had built, and what adoption patterns looked like across similar products.

In-depth interviews

Qualitative interviews with current customers exploring their actual working patterns, device behaviour and the moments where mobile would — or wouldn't — add value.

Customer survey

Quantitative survey exploring appeal and feature requirements across the wider customer base — giving the qualitative findings a scale and weight that could hold up in internal decision-making.

Eye tracking & UI evaluation

Used eye tracking to evaluate new designs against defined goals — assessing not just usability but emotional response, and whether the designs aligned with the company's strategic intent.

Concept validation & feature prioritisation

Tested early concepts with users to surface concerns and validate direction. Translated findings into a V1 feature set focused on extreme simplicity — one key everyday task done exceptionally well.

The outcome

From 'we don't need this' to live in six months

The research made the case. Leadership approved the investment. The app launched six months later.

More than just a green light, the research shaped what got built. The feature prioritisation meant the team didn't over-engineer V1 — they built what customers actually needed first, with a clear evidence-based roadmap for what came next.

Post-launch satisfaction scores were high. The ongoing measurement framework established during the research phase gave the product team a continuous feedback loop to iterate against.