If the person buying your software isn’t the person using it, you need to understand how you create value for both.
In enterprise software, those people can have very different priorities. The buyer needs a product that meets organizational requirements. The user needs something that lets them get their work done. You can satisfy the first and still make the second miserable.
That changes how you should think about investing in features and UX.
Features can get you the sale. Good UX can help turn that sale into adoption, internal advocacy, and growth. But renewals complicate the picture, because a customer can keep paying for software they’d rather replace.
Features help you get bought
A buyer needs to know whether the product can do the job. Does it support the required workflow? Does it integrate with existing systems? Can it meet security and compliance requirements?
If you’re missing a required capability, a great interface may not get you very far. You need to pass that threshold.
This makes feature work easy to justify. A salesperson can point to a deal and say, “We need this capability to close it.” There’s a customer, a requirement, and potential revenue attached to the work.
UX problems can be harder to connect to a specific deal. The product technically supports the workflow, but completing it takes too many steps. People need training to find things. They make mistakes or build spreadsheets around the awkward parts.
Those costs show up in everyday use. They may never arrive as a clear request from the person signing the contract.
If sales requests drive your roadmap, you can keep adding capabilities while making the product increasingly difficult to use.
UX helps people get value from what you sold
Once the software is in the organization, somebody has to use those features.
You can sell reporting because the product has a reporting module. But can someone produce the report they need without asking an administrator for help? Can they understand the results? Can they repeat the process next month?
That’s where UX matters.
When I say UX here, I mean how well the product supports the actual work. Can people find the right action, understand what will happen, and recover when something goes wrong? Does the interface make a complicated task manageable?
Good UX gives users a reason to keep using the product and recommend it to other people. That grassroots support can matter before the purchase, too: users can research products and become advocates who help get them approved. NN/G’s B2B research describes that relationship between users and decision makers.
So I like the intuition behind “features win the fight, UX wins the war.” You get through the initial buying decision, then earn support through repeated use.
But that assumes the people using the product have enough influence to affect what happens next.
A renewal doesn’t prove the UX is good
Enterprise customers can have substantial switching costs. Contracts, integrations, and moving data all make replacement difficult. NN/G’s research on B2B constraints discusses several of those costs.
A customer might renew because the product works well. They might also renew because migrating would be a massive project nobody wants to take on.
Vendor lock-in can be commercially effective. It also makes retention a poor signal of whether users value the experience.
You need to look at what’s happening inside the account. Are people adopting the workflows you built? Are they recommending the product to other teams? How much training and support do they need? What workarounds have they created?
I’d use those questions to guide UX investment. Start with the work people repeat and the friction that prevents them from getting value from your capabilities.
You still need the features that make the product eligible for purchase. But once those capabilities exist, keep improving the experience of using them. Give people a reason to advocate for the product, even when they aren’t the person paying for it.