Stop designing for the demo

Every SaaS team over-invests in the screens that demo well and under-invests in the screens users live in.

The dashboard gets three design rounds. The settings page gets none. Then you watch a session recording and realize your power users spend 80% of their time in a table view nobody has touched since launch.

A quick heuristic I use with clients: rank your screens by minutes spent per week, not by visibility in the sales deck. Design effort should roughly follow that ranking. It almost never does, and fixing that mismatch is some of the cheapest UX improvement available.

The demo still matters. But a product that feels great on a Tuesday afternoon renews itself.