What 60 Pain Points Actually Look Like, And How to Find Yours

It was a Wednesday morning, and I was standing in a room full of people who were sure they understood their own product.

We were at Sedex, a global compliance platform where audit submissions routinely took 45 days to complete. My colleague, the product manager, and I had spent weeks mapping the current-state journeys on sticky notes before this meeting. Now we were presenting them to every team involved in the auditing process, all in one room, for the first time. The wall behind us was covered in them.

Everyone had a version of what was broken. The operations team pointed to slow reviewers. The technology team blamed legacy data flows. The support team said users just didn't understand the process. Each group had a clear, internally consistent story about where the friction lived.

They weren't wrong, exactly. They just weren't seeing the whole picture.

The comfortable fiction of knowing your product

Most product teams operate under an assumption that feels obvious but rarely gets examined: if you built it, and you talk to your users, you already know what's wrong.

This assumption is especially seductive in regulated industries. When your platform handles compliance workflows, clinical documentation, or audit trails, you're close to the process by design. Founders and product leaders in health tech talk to clinicians. They watch session recordings. They read support tickets. It feels like enough.

And for simple products, that might even be true. If you're building a single-purpose tool with one user type and a linear workflow, staying close to the product probably does give you a decent picture.

But regulated platforms aren't simple products. They have multiple user types with competing needs, compliance requirements that constrain the design space, and workflows that span departments, time zones, sometimes weeks. The complexity means that no single team, no matter how close they are to the work, can hold the full picture in their heads.

What happened when we stopped asking the boardroom

After gathering the internal teams' version of reality, we went to the users.

We had three core personas across the platform. We ran interview after interview, dozens of conversations, not usability tests with scripted tasks but open, exploratory sessions designed to surface how people actually moved through the system.

Two things happened.

First, some of the boardroom assumptions held up. The problems the internal teams had identified were real. They existed. That part was validating.

Second, a different layer emerged. Micro-problems that nobody inside the organization had ever named. Small points of friction that only the users could feel, because they were the ones navigating the system under real conditions, with real time pressure, with real consequences for getting it wrong.

A confusing status label that caused people to re-check their work three times. A notification that arrived too late to be useful. A required field that didn't match how auditors actually collected their data. None of these showed up in the internal teams' mental model of the product. Each one was invisible from the inside.

The final count was over 60 systemic pain points.

The number itself isn't the story. What matters is where those pain points came from. They arrived in two distinct layers: what the organization could see, and what only the users could articulate. A significant portion of them were completely invisible to the people who maintained and improved the platform every day.

The gap where the roadmap lives

If you're a founder or product leader building a clinical product, this pattern should sound familiar.

Your therapists, doctors, or care coordinators use your product under conditions you've never fully replicated in a demo or a usability test. The clinical workflow they actually follow diverges from the one your product assumes. And the micro-friction, the moment where a clinician hesitates before trusting an AI-generated note, the extra click that breaks a documentation flow, the notification that interrupts a session, that friction compounds silently.

It compounds until activation stalls. Until retention drops and nobody on the team can explain why. Until clinicians describe your product as "fine, I guess" in interviews, which is the polite version of "I've already built workarounds for everything that doesn't work." I saw the same pattern in digital health product design, where the gap between tracking behavior and changing it was precisely the kind of invisible friction that teams couldn't see from inside their own product.

A health tech UX audit isn't a heuristic checklist. It's not a two-day exercise where a designer runs through your screens with a set of principles. It's the dual-layer process: first, map what the team believes is broken. Then go to the people doing the work and find out what's actually happening. The gap between those two layers is where the roadmap lives.

At Sedex, the single re-framing that drove audit submissions from 45 days down to 10 came from that gap. It was a problem the teams had walked past every day. They couldn't see it because it lived in the users' experience, not in the system's logic. In clinical AI, this invisible layer runs even deeper: the signals therapist software was never built to capture are often the ones that matter most for outcomes.

Two layers, one principle

Pain point mapping is a two-layer process. The first layer, what your team thinks is broken, is necessary. It's where the obvious problems live, and ignoring it would be foolish.

But it's never sufficient.

The second layer, what only surfaces when you sit with the people doing the work, is where the leverage lives. It's where the 4x improvements hide. It's where the problems that actually explain your retention curve are waiting to be named.

If you've only done the first layer, you haven't audited your product. You've confirmed your own assumptions.

The most expensive problem in your product isn't the one your team is debating. It's the one they can't see yet.

Further Reading

Holz, M., Heinonen, K., & Jaakkola, E. (2024). Eliminating customer experience pain points in complex customer journeys through smart service solutions. Psychology & Marketing, 41(4), 801–818. Read the paper

Torres, T. (2021). Continuous discovery habits: Discover products that create customer value and business value. Product Talk LLC. Read more