In SaaS, small teams that manage to disrupt well-established incumbents aren’t trying to go toe-to-toe with their competitors. They simply don’t have the money, the people, or the built-out features.
What they do have, however, is a product that’s built so well that people are willing to give it a chance just because the experience of using it is so delightful. That is why product design reviews have such a key role to play in SaaS, and why even the way they do bug tracking or issue capture can pave the way to a winning product-led growth strategy.
The way design and development collaborate and iterate together can make or break a product team. The interplay between the two is how Notion narrowly avoided totally crashing right out of the gate, and how Hubspot overhauled one of their most-used product screens. Webflow even went ahead and made iterative digital design a core theme in their mission.
The tl;dr of it is that building an awesome product that will get users to the transaction point naturally doesn’t happen by accident. It takes a conscious effort for a product team to get there, starting with some of the most basic building blocks of the whole product building process: how to capture bugs, share feedback, and track issues around the design of the product.
that design-led thinking has created a new lever for business value: product-led growth.
You Can’t Have Product-Led Growth Without a Proper Design-Led Approach
Product-led growth became the hot new thing to pursue in SaaS about 5 years ago. The idea that the product itself could be leveraged to create a buying journey might seem a bit simplistic, but there is an actual science to propre PLG, which makes startups that crack the code to it extremely valuable.
The subject of product-led growth has generated a lot of content already, but for teams looking for a good formal introduction, this multi-part blog series on Go-to-Market-Fit and Product-Led growth by BlackBird Ventures is a great place to start.
For SaaS startups, especially those operating on a B2B model, a well-designed product that seems to intuitively take the user from one piece of value to another, until the progress to a transaction is almost inevitable, is the holy grail. However, that sort of user experience doesn’t happen by accident. For that you need a few things.
- A well-defined ICP (or a clear plan to identify one)
- A clearly-articulated value proposition
A roadmap to deliver it - and someone with clear understanding of your value prop to steer it - A mechanism to gather data and constantly test your assumptions about the roadmap and the ICP
- And finally, killer design and development execution.
At Iteration X, we’re mostly interested in solving for that last bit - we want to give small teams with killer design and software skills the ability to execute on their vision much, much faster, which is why we spend a lot of time thinking about the everyday tasks of designers, developers, and product and QA people working on front-end heavy products.
How to bring joy back to bug tracking and design reviews
Designing great products is impossible if you’re not continuously thinking about how the user will experience them. However, no one loves the nitpicky work of going over every pixel of a contextual menu, or overthinking the placement of a new button over yet another Slack thread - it’s a lot more exciting to solve technical challenge the back-end, or to put together the overall visual identity of an entirely new product.
But those types of nitpicky design reviews are what results in a product that keeps users engaged at every step, so how do you keep everyone in the team aligned and motivated about adopting a design-led approach to product building? We think it comes down to two things:
- Have a solid design review process - and find ways to keep everything properly organized and easily accessible without wasting team time on it
- Automate as much as possible, especially the bug capture and bug tracking parts of he work, both to remove tediousness from the process and to speed things up as much as possible
Implementing a solid review process
Making design review an integral part of every release cycle is crucial, even when some design tasks are handled by product developers. A formalized design review process ensures that:
- All design implementations are thoroughly vetted before shipping so nothing looks cheap, broken, or counterintuitive.
- Design quality is maintained consistently across updates so users come to expect high-quality from the product.
And most importantly
- The user experience is preserved throughout, and The product evolves without straying from its user experience goals, again creating consistency for the users.
This is even more important for small teams that are caught up in shipping as fast as possible; ‘move fast and break things’ is often interpreted as a permission to ship buggy products with approximate designs, with the idea that the team will go back to them later. Spoiler alert, they usually don’t, because they’re busy shipping the next round of features.
So how do you formalize the design review process to result in a user experience that is truly delightful?
There is a ton of literature on the subject out there, starting with this 5-step process, so we won’t expand on the subject. However, we found the following tips helpful in making the design review process successful. Regardless of how you choose to implement it:
- People over process: Processes won’t stick unless they’re made to fit into people’s existing workflows as much as possible. For example, if your team likes to review and leave feedback asynchronously, don’t try to make ‘working sessions’ a thing. Instead, create a review step that can be done asynchronously.
- Practice what you preach: when you can’t fit into an existing workflow, give the product team a new workflow that is satisfying and delightful so they will adopt it. This is usually much easier to do if you have the right tools, which takes us to the next point: automation.
- Automate the tedious bits: Remove frustrating steps, like having to hunt down a bug template in the team Drive, or requiring people to copy-paste issues or tasks from one system to another. Instead, test out a few tools that remove steps from issue capture or bug tracking, and make it easier to keep design review well-organized, with the right labels and dates, a good system to assign bugs and issues to team members, and a designated space for discussion when needed.
Automating issue capture and bug tracking
We have strong opinions about the subject, obviously. We think the most natural way to collaborate over front-end, design, and UX product issues is to use a system like Iteration X, where you can capture issues in their context with 1 click, either with a screenshot or a screen recording, and push that issue in the Iteration X issue tracker.
Here’s why we think it works really well:
1- The bug capture comes with all the details anyone would need to fix the issue, from port size to browser info to the URL where the issue was captured. The ITX issue tracker even comes with a ‘In-UI’ view, where all your issues are pinned on the page to make it easier to understand their context.
2- The issue can be documented following a bug template of your choice. Issues in Iteration X come with rich text descriptions, and the ITX Copilot can help you format those descriptions to fit bug templates that already exist in your documentation. No copy-paste needed ever again.
3- The above will soon be improved with the task creation AI-assist features we have coming live soon, where your issues can have assignees, labels, statuses, etc, suggested and documented in one click.
4- Bug tracking and issue fixing is a lot easier when you have AI helping you identify issues that look similar, or jumpstarting your brainstorming process by suggesting best practices for the UI in your attached screen capture.
We really think that Iteration X is the best issue tracking tool for front-end heavy product teams who want to unlock product-led growth. However, if you feel like you don’t need AI to help with your design review process, or if you really don’t want to move away from Linear, Jira or Asana just yet, the Iteration X Quick Capture tool can be used to push fully documented issues to all three. We already integrate with Linear, Jira, Asana and Make.com, and we’re also working on a Slack and a Github integration so you can move issues from one tool to another in your toolstack seamlessly.
Regardless of the tools you end up using, however, the point stands that design reviews will be a lot more effective, and deliver great products a lot more consistently, if you use technology to make them less painful.
A Quick note on the ITX Bug Capture Extension and Bug Tracking Platform
If you’re not familiar with Iteration X, here’s the quick summary: It’s an AI-native issue tracker and project management platform, built for small teams who are building front-end heavy products.
A few more details:
Quick Capture Chrome Extension:
ITX offers a free browser extension that enables effortless issue capturing directly in your browser, allowing for the creation of bug reports with visual highlights, browser information, and full context with just one click.
It supports multi-format bug capture, including screenshots, web elements, tab recordings, and screencasts, on both desktop and mobile. It also automatically documents issues with all necessary browser info to reproduce a bug, placing visual pins in the live UI where issues are captured .
Iteration X Issue Tracker:
The ITX issue tracker provides everything you need to organize projects and tracks bugs or issues, like due dates, priority and statuses, labels, assignees, collaboration features, and robust filtering and (soon) grouping.
The real difference, however, is in our context-aware AI co-pilot that uses your team’s documents and project history to help deliver tasks related to design, development, and project management more effectively.
improve this UI with ITX compressed (1).mp4
We have even more AI-assisted task management features in the pipeline, aiming to enable the entire team to create well-documented tasks and keep projects organized for faster delivery.
Iteration X comes with powerful data privacy, security, and segregation, being GDPR compliant and certified in ISO27001/27701 and SOC II Type 2. We make sure that your data is never used for model training.
Mobile and Desktop Compatibility:
ITX Quick Capture browser extension is compatible with any Chromium browser on desktop, and a mobile capture SDK is coming soon, which will extend the one-click visual issue capture capability to native mobile apps.
—
For any SaaS startup looking to initiate proper PLG and outdo the big players, embracing a design-led approach is a must. This strategy, along with a thorough design review process, isn't just an option—it's a necessity. It can impact how you do even something as routine as bug tracking, and can significantly boost your UI's appeal to users.
We’re building Iteration X to be the best tool for that particular job, and we want it to simplify adopting a robust design-led strategy across your team.
Give it a go for free here. And if you have thought on how to make it better, let us know through the in-app chat or with a quick note. We promise, we’ll always respond!
