Most founders we work with hit the same wall: they've built great products with powerful features, but users either don't know how to use them or can't find them. One founder told us, "Users had issues that were already solved — they just didn't find the features." Another said, "We built something great, but people didn't get the value." If that sounds familiar, here's how we helped one startup turn that confusion into activation — using a three-step process, in five weeks.

Step one: understand the product context

We started with a UX audit — walking the product, flagging friction, then summarising key findings, pros and cons, and the areas to improve, all placed on an impact/effort scale so the team could pick the initiatives that actually move the product and the business. But an audit is only the first part. In a strategy workshop we laid the groundwork with the founders: the product, personas and stakeholders, problems to solve, core features, blockers, constraints, and how they measure success. We reviewed untested assumptions, mapped competitors, and built out user personas — needs, goals, motivations, fears, frustrations, the triggers that bring people to a tool like this, and the anxieties they carry from similar tools. Then we mapped the user journey, which surfaced two big pain areas: onboarding, and using the core product. Those became the focus of the redesign.

Step two: bring ideas to life and test them

From there, a design sprint workshop. First, alignment — getting on the same page about the challenges, the users, the problems, and where the product is going in the next two years. Then we looked outward at how other companies solve similar challenges: how they onboard, how they help users customise their experience, how they help users understand value. We collected those ideas in one place, then moved into pen-and-paper sketches, which became the starting point for deciding what to actually test. We defined a user test flow — the main steps customers go through — built a clickable prototype from the sketches, and ran it with users. We captured every piece of feedback, summarised insights per user and per task, and colour-coded what worked (green), what was tricky (yellow), and the biggest pain points (red), pulling quotes for depth.

Step three: design the assets for development

Once we had the insights, we moved from prototype to the new product design — a design system with everything development needs (colours, typography, buttons, input fields) and all the flows: signup and login, the onboarding flow, the meetings experience, and the meeting details where users actually understand the value and see what the product can do.

So in five weeks we went from "users are asking for features that already exist but can't find them" and "they can't grasp the product's main value" to tested solutions and a development-ready redesign. The point isn't the timeline — it's the sequence. Diagnose where users actually get stuck, test solutions with real users before committing engineering time, and only then design for build. That's how you turn a feature discoverability problem into activation.

If users can't find what you've already built, get in touch and we'll map where the confusion lives.