What’s the single most expensive mistake you can make in SaaS design? It’s not a clunky interface or an ugly color scheme. The costliest error is building a flawless solution to a problem nobody actually has.

According to a CB Insights analysis, the #1 reason startups fail is "no market need." This is where a sharp UX problem statement becomes your most valuable asset, turning guesswork into a strategic advantage.

It’s the compass that ensures you're solving real problems for real people, which is the only reliable path to building a product they’ll love and pay for.

But how do you write effective UX problem statements? And what are the mistakes you must avoid?

Let's find out.

What Is a UX Problem Statement?

Image source: FlowMapp

A UX problem statement articulates the user challenge your design team needs to address. It identifies who experiences the problem, the context where it happens, and why solving it matters for users and business outcomes.

Unlike feature requests or solution proposals, UX problem statements focus purely on understanding and framing the issue, serving multiple functions within product teams:

1. Scoping devices that define project boundaries

2. Communication tools that align stakeholders around problem importance

3. Research focus that guides discovery questions

4. Ideation catalyst that sparks creative thinking

Most teams draft initial problem statements during discovery workshops using the "5 Ws" method (Who, What, Where, When, Why). This approach gathers the facts needed to construct meaningful statements.

Your problem statement becomes a touchstone for evaluating potential solutions. Does this design actually solve the problem we identified? Does it address the core user need we uncovered?

Problem statements evolve as you learn through research. Start with a clear statement to set discovery goals, but remain open to refining it based on new insights, so you always solve the right problem.

Why Do UX Problem Statements Matter for SaaS?

SaaS companies face a unique challenge. Unlike traditional software, they can't just ship a product and move on. Success depends on users staying engaged, month after month, year after year.

In such a scenario, UX problem statements become your strategic advantage in this environment.

Let’s explore why this simple document is a superpower for your product and design teams:

1. Creates Unwavering Team Alignment

One of the biggest hurdles in product development is getting everyone on the same page. When designers, engineers, and product managers have slightly different ideas about what you’re trying to fix, you get a fractured user experience.

A sharp UX problem statement cuts through that ambiguity. It becomes the single source of truth that your whole team can rally behind, ensuring everyone is solving the same problem with a shared vision.

"If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions." - Albert Einstein

This shared focus means your team spends less time in meetings debating what to build and more time actually creating solutions that matter.

2. Acts as a Shield Against Feature Creep

We’ve all seen it happen. "Feature creep" is the silent killer of many promising SaaS products. It starts with one small, "nice-to-have" addition, and soon the product is bloated, complicated, and has lost sight of its original purpose.

A strong problem statement is your best line of defense, and gives you a simple filter for every new idea. Just ask: "Does this directly help solve the core problem we identified for our user?"

If not, you have a solid reason to say "not right now." This discipline is a key part of great SaaS design process.

3. Provides a Clear Benchmark for Success

How do you know if a redesign or new feature actually worked? Without a defined problem, success is often judged on gut feelings. That's a risky way to build a business.

When you start with a problem, you inherently define the yardstick for success. For instance, if your problem is, "Our users are struggling to locate their analytics dashboard," success becomes measurable.

You can track the time it takes to find it, the number of clicks, or a drop in support tickets. This turns design choices into data-driven victories.

4. Empowers Purposeful Innovation

Contrary to what some might think, a tight constraint like a problem statement doesn’t stifle creativity, rather focuses it.

When your team has a deep, empathetic understanding of what a user is going through, they can direct their creative energy where it will have the most impact.

Instead of throwing random ideas at the wall, they can channel their expertise into finding the most elegant and effective way to solve that one, specific, validated issue.

5. Secures Stakeholder Buy-In

Getting budget and resources approved can be tough. A UX problem statement, especially when backed by data, is a powerful tool for persuasion. It clearly articulates not just the user’s pain but its impact on the business (e.g., churn, low adoption, support costs).

This frames your design work as a strategic business initiative, making it much easier for stakeholders to understand the value and get behind your project.

6. Drives better product-market fit

Achieving product-market fit requires understanding who uses your product and why. A strong UX problem statement helps identify actual people experiencing the problem you want to solve, connecting your product idea to real human experiences.

At our agency, we often validate problem statements with users to ensure we're building products that genuinely solve market needs. This validation process becomes critical because "You can't grow a product that hasn't reached product-market fit".

When products address validated user problems, they naturally align with market demands. This alignment creates a foundation for sustainable growth as customers find genuine value in what you're offering, stick around longer, and become advocates for your solution.

The entire journey of reaching product-market fit starts with properly defining the problem. This makes UX problem statements an indispensable tool for SaaS success.

7. Reduces churn by solving real pain points

For SaaS businesses, churn can make or break your entire operation. The subscription churn rate determines whether you have a sustainable business.

Focus problem statements on addressing genuine user pain points, and you can significantly reduce voluntary churn.

Consider these examples: One team updated their onboarding flow to better showcase non-seasonal features and boosted engagement by 30%. Another simple change to a cancelation screen reduced churn by 18%.

These improvements directly resulted from properly identifying and addressing real user problems - thereby highlighting the use case for having strong UX problem statements.

How to Write a Strong UX Problem Statement? - (Step-by-Step Process)

Image source: The Interaction Design Foundation

Staring at a mountain of user feedback and trying to distill it into a single, sharp UX problem statement can feel overwhelming. But it doesn't have to be. With the right approach, you can cut through the noise. The first step?

Set your own assumptions aside and get ready to listen to your users. It all starts with identifying customer pain points which actually matter, since that's your foundation for everything that follows.

Here's a stepwise approach to crafting an effective UX problem statement:

Step 1: Start by Synthesizing Your Research

Before you can write anything, you need data. The best problem statements aren't born from boardroom brainstorming; they're grounded in evidence from actual user feedback.

Here's how you can start doing user research:

• Gather insights: Use a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods. Think open-ended surveys, in-depth interviews, and hands-on usability tests.

• Find the patterns: Once you have the data, your job is to connect the dots. Look for common threads. Are multiple users getting stuck at the same point? Do they keep mentioning the same frustration? These recurring themes are gold.

You can also consider methods like empathy mapping, which captures what users said, did, thought, and felt during research sessions.

At our agency, we also sometimes run "Space, Saturate, and Group" exercises where teams collate all observations into one place, creating a visual collage of experiences and insights that inform problem definition.

Step 2: Lean on a Proven Framework

Okay, you’ve pinpointed a core user struggle. Now, how do you frame it in a way that’s actually useful? This is where a simple but incredibly effective tool comes in: the 5 Ws framework. It forces you to get specific and cover all the critical angles.

Here's an example of a B2B SaaS workflow, leveraging the 5Ws framework for defining their UX problem statement:

Step 3: Use a Simple Template for SaaS Teams

Now, let's pull all these pieces into a clean, repeatable format. Using a template ensures every problem statement your team creates is consistent, clear, and actionable.

Here’s a structure that works beautifully, especially for SaaS products:

[Our user persona] needs a way to [achieve a specific goal] because [insight about their pain point or challenge].

Why does this work so well? It keeps the focus squarely on the human on the other side of the screen, their core need, and the "why" behind it.

It’s concise, user-centric, and gives your team a clear problem to solve without jumping the gun and dictating the solution.

Step 4: Add context and constraints

Context transforms a generic problem statement into a targeted one. Provide relevant background information that helps others understand when and where the problem occurs. Include essential constraints without being overly restrictive.

Explain how the problem impacts users emotionally and practically. For instance: "Users are abandoning the checkout process because it requires too many steps, leading to frustration and lost sales."

This contextual information further creates empathy and helps stakeholders understand the problem's significance.

Step 5: Align with business objectives

Connect your problem statement to relevant business goals and metrics. Show how solving this particular user problem supports organizational success.

You can quantify the business impact by calculating how much the problem costs the organization.

This alignment ensures your solution not only enhances user experience but delivers tangible business value.

Step 6: Keep it concise and testable

The best problem statements are simple enough to remember but detailed enough to guide decisions.

Refine your problem statement until it's brief yet actionable. A good problem statement should be concise enough for quick understanding yet detailed enough to provide clear direction.

Make it testable by ensuring you can measure whether potential solutions actually solve the identified problem. This often means including or identifying success metrics that will determine whether your eventual solution effectively addresses the issue.

After drafting your initial statement, take time to review and refine it with your team.

A well-crafted problem statement becomes the touchstone against which all potential solutions can be evaluated, keeping your design process focused on addressing genuine user needs.

UX Problem Statement Examples for B2B SaaS

Theory is one thing, but seeing a well-crafted UX problem statement in the wild is when it all clicks.

Let's examine four common challenges faced by leading B2B SaaS platforms and how properly framing these issues led to better solutions.

Given below are some common UX problem statement examples that cost the companies millions in revenue & increased user churn:

1. Slack: For Remote Collaboration

Image source: Slack

Problem Statement: New Slack users experience significant friction during initial workspace setup, causing confusion and abandonment before they reach their first meaningful interaction with the platform.

Slack's core value proposition depends entirely on successful user activation. No activation means no team collaboration, which means no value delivery.

From 2014 to 2019, Slack continuously refined their onboarding experience by addressing specific friction points. Here's what they discovered:

Their initial approach overwhelmed users with 123 words of explanatory text across multiple screens before users experienced any value. The result? High abandonment rates during setup.

Over time, they simplified this to just 7 words on a single welcome screen. But they didn't stop there. They evolved further to immediately drop users into a functional "General" channel with contextual guidance.

The password problem was killing conversions. Slack removed password creation requirements during signup, first replacing it with a post-signup email notification, then shifting to a simple 6-digit confirmation code. This single change dramatically reduced the barrier between signup and the user's first meaningful action.

Something interesting: Slack evolved from using multiple hotspots to introduce UI elements toward letting Slackbot teach users by using the platform itself.

This created an interactive learning experience that built competence through practice rather than explanation.

2. Asana: For Team Leaders

Finally, consider a project management tool like Asana. The user isn't a certified project manager but a newly promoted team lead trying to keep everything on track.

Problem Statement: "A new team leader needs to get a quick, high-level overview of their team's workload and project progress because they lack a simple way to spot potential bottlenecks without manually checking in on every single task."

This statement is about visibility and control. It zeroes in on the user (new team leader) and their goal (a quick progress overview). The critical insight is the pain of having to manually chase down updates.

This gives the Asana team a clear directive: build intuitive dashboards that empower leaders to see the forest, not just the trees.

3. Notion: Difficulty in team permission management

Problem Statement: Team administrators waste significant time managing access permissions in Notion because the multi-layered permission system (with teamspaces, groups, and individual settings) creates confusion about who can view, edit or share specific content.

Notion's permission structure combines teamspace settings, permission groups, and page-level access controls. This complexity stems from trying to serve multiple needs simultaneously:

"You need a simple way to provision access to groups of people at once, according to their role, team, and level at the company."

The platform offers 3 teamspace types (Open, Closed, and Private) with five different permission levels (Full Access, Can Edit, Can Edit Content, Can Comment, and Can View).

Pages inherit permissions from teamspaces but can have customized access, creating nested permission structures that quickly become difficult to track.

The biggest struggle? Understanding permission inheritance.

As Notion explains: "When permissions levels and teamspaces interact, individuals will always retain the most permissive access levels" - a concept that proves challenging to visualize and manage in practice.

4. Intercom: Delayed response time in live chat

Problem Statement: Business customers using Intercom's live chat feature experience unpredictable response times without clear expectations, causing frustration and undermining trust in both Intercom and the businesses using it.

Here's the problem: Intercom's response time calculation method creates misalignment between customer expectations and actual service delivery.

They calculate "median first response time" rather than average response time. They measure the time within which 50% of messages received a response. This creates a misleading metric that completely ignores the other 50% of conversations.

One expert identified the fundamental flaw: "Whatever number you get, it is hard to build an intuition if it's a good value or not. For example, if your first response time is 2 hours for 50%, but for other 50%, it's 2 days. Is it good or bad?"

Customers report having no way to indicate urgency in the system: "When I submit a ticket via the intercom chat/messenger, it doesn't ask me what the priority is... I don't have any visibility or assurance that if I do submit a high-priority ticket, how will I know when to expect a response."

Common Mistakes Founders Make With UX Problem Statements

It’s surprisingly easy to get a UX problem statement wrong, even with the best intentions. A poorly framed statement can send your entire project down a rabbit hole.

By learning to spot the common pitfalls, you can keep your team focused on solving problems that actually matter to your users.

Here they are:

1. Making the Problem Too Broad

One of the biggest traps is writing a problem statement that’s so vague it’s impossible to act on. Think of something like, "Our users need a better dashboard." What does "better" even mean? Faster? More visually appealing? Easier to customize?

A statement like that offers zero direction. It opens the door to endless debates and a final product that tries to be everything to everyone but satisfies no one. A strong problem statement needs to be specific enough to give your team clear guardrails.

2. Baking a Solution into the Statement

This one is subtle but incredibly restrictive. It happens when you frame the problem with a specific solution already in mind, like: "Our users need a drag-and-drop interface to manage their tasks."

By prescribing a solution, you’ve killed innovation before the design process even starts. What if a smarter filtering system or an AI assistant would be a far more elegant solution?

The whole point of a UX problem statement is to define the problem, not to dictate the answer.

3. Relying on Assumptions Instead of Research

This is probably the most dangerous mistake. When your problem statement is built on internal opinions or what you think users want, you’re building your product on a foundation of sand.

You end up solving problems for yourselves, not your actual customers. Every part of your problem statement should be backed by real evidence from user interviews, surveys, or usability tests.

This is a fundamental part of the design thinking process, which is all about empathy.

4. Forgetting the "Why" Behind the Problem

A problem statement falls flat if it doesn't explain the impact. Just stating, "Users can't find the export button," isn't enough. You have to go deeper and articulate why this matters to them.

A much stronger version would be: "Our users can't find the export button, which prevents them from sharing crucial reports with their leadership, causing project delays and frustration."

Now the team gets it. That context builds empathy and a sense of urgency.

5. Focusing on Business Goals Instead of User Needs

Your problem statement should not be, "We need to increase user retention by 15%." That's a business goal, not a user problem. While the user's problem should ultimately connect to business goals, the statement itself must be framed from the user's perspective.

The user doesn’t care about your retention rate; they care about their own struggles. By solving their problem effectively, you achieve your business goal as a result.

6. Writing in Isolation

A problem statement written by one person in a vacuum is doomed to fail. To be effective, it must be a shared artifact, created with input from designers, developers, and product managers.

This collaborative process ensures everyone understands the nuances of the user’s struggle and feels a sense of ownership over the solution.

Without this shared context, the statement is just another document that gets ignored.

7. Not validating the problem with users

Saying you want to "validate" a problem suggests you already know it exists and just want confirmation.

This mindset blocks real discovery. Approach problem statements as hypotheses to test, not truths to validate. Stay open to finding completely different problems than what you initially assumed.

Additional Tips for SaaS Teams

Most teams stop at basic problem statements. The ones that succeed go deeper.

These advanced techniques help SaaS teams maximize the impact of their problem statements throughout the entire product development process:

1. Use the '5 Whys' to uncover root causes

Surface-level problems hide the real issues. The '5 Whys' technique cuts through symptoms to reach actual root causes by repeatedly asking "why?" until you can't go deeper.

Originally developed by Sakichi Toyoda for Toyota, this method prevents teams from addressing symptoms rather than underlying issues. Ask "why" five consecutive times to peel back layers and reveal the fundamental nature of the problem.

Example:

• Users abandon checkout → Why? Too many form fields

• Why too many fields? → Need shipping and billing info

• Why separate forms? → System requires both addresses

• Why system limitation? → Legacy architecture constraints

• Why not updated? → Root cause: No technical debt prioritization
  
  

2. Involve customer success teams in problem discovery

Customer success teams sit on a goldmine of user insights. They interact with users daily and spot patterns that research sessions miss.

CS teams help identify common sticking points in your product and provide an additional data source that supplements formal research. The caveat: CS data typically comes from "the loudest voices" – customers with extreme sentiments.

Use CS insights to validate problems but don't rely on them exclusively. Balance vocal feedback with broader user research.

3. Map problems to specific user journeys

User journey maps reveal exactly where users hit roadblocks. These visual representations help you pinpoint problem locations for more targeted solutions.

Journey mapping builds empathy by showing potential frustrations from the user's perspective.

More importantly, it connects problems to specific touchpoints, making solutions more precise and measurable.

4. Use metrics to validate problem severity

Not all problems deserve equal attention. Problem severity combines three factors: frequency (how common), impact (how difficult to overcome), and persistence (one-time or recurring).

Have multiple team members rate severity independently. Three evaluators typically provide satisfactory ratings for practical purposes.

This removes individual bias and creates more reliable prioritization.

5. Create a problem statement backlog for sprints

Integrate UX problem statements directly into your development backlog. This ensures design and development stay aligned throughout sprints.

Avoid separating design and development into different teams with separate backlogs – this creates "two sources of truth". Instead, maintain a single product backlog where UX problems drive development priorities.

Each problem statement becomes a backlog item with clear acceptance criteria: the problem is solved when users can complete their goals without the identified friction.

Conclusion

A well-crafted UX problem statement is your north star in the often-confusing world of SaaS development. It’s the tool that keeps you honest, ensuring you solve real-world challenges instead of just shipping shiny features.

The advanced techniques we covered - the 5 Whys method, involving customer success teams, mapping problems to user journeys - these aren't nice-to-haves. They're what separate teams that build products users love from teams that build products users abandon.

Ready to solve the problems that actually matter to your users? The team at Bricx can help you define and tackle your most critical UX challenges. Book a call with us today!

FAQs

Is a 'UX problem statement' the same as a 'hypothesis'?

No, they're both very different.

A UX problem statement defines a validated user struggle based on past and present research: it's the known "what" and "why."

A hypothesis, on the other hand, is a testable guess about a future solution—the "how we might fix it."

You need a clear problem statement first to formulate a meaningful hypothesis.

Who should be involved in writing a problem statement?

Crafting a problem statement is a team sport. While a UX researcher or product manager might lead, involving designers, engineers, and key stakeholders from the start is crucial.

This collaborative approach builds a shared understanding and sense of ownership over the challenge.

How often should we revisit our UX problem statement?

Treat it as a living document. It's wise to revisit your problem statement after each significant round of user research or usability testing.

If new insights fundamentally change your understanding of the user's struggle, it's time to refine the statement to reflect that new knowledge.

What if our user research uncovers multiple problems?

This is common! The key is ruthless prioritization. Use a framework like an impact/effort matrix to identify the one problem that, if solved, would create the most value for both your users and the business.

Focus all your energy there, solve it brilliantly, and then move on.