The New Product Debt You're Ignoring

Considering multiple cultures and how they impact a SaaS product wasn’t really a big deal. Until now. While product managers and CTOs are familiar with technology debt, many aren’t well acquainted with cultural debt. Which is like a stealth tax on your user experience, quietly eroding product adoption and eventually, team efficiency. So what is cultural debt when it comes to digital products and how can you deal with it?

Understanding Cultural Debt in Digital Products

Boiled down, cultural debt is the accumulating cost of misalignment between product assumptions and your markets cultural realities. Just like technical debt, it compounds over time. Early warning signs can include increased support costs, barriers to adoption and market resistance in some segments. 

For example, when your SaaS product uses American business practices and European or Latin American businesses need to create workarounds, that’s cultural debt. If your Gen Z users are creating TikTok videos that explain to “actually use” your product, that’s cultural debt. Or you’re suddenly dropping Asian clients in the mobile app because notification systems ignore their cultural practices, that’s a hidden signal of cultural debt.

Over time, these issues start to compound, just like technical debt. Most product managers and UX researchers attempt to account for this by creating diverse personas and apply ethnographic elements to their research. This only goes so far and doesn’t solve for cultural debt because it’s too limiting.

If your SaaS product is global, you may be missing markets and revenue not paying attention to cultural debt. If you’re think “well my market is only the USA and Canada” you’re definitely missing significant cultural market opportunities.

Dealing With Cultural Debt

While you might be sitting there with a cold sweat and thinking “oh great, something else to add to the workload”, don’t worry. You can take steps to understand your degree of cultural debt. Then build dealing with it into your current workflows, especially if you’re using some form of agile methodology. I’ve helped teams do this in a manageable way without compounding workloads and workflows.

Here are some initial steps to take to understand your cultural debt and the level of importance that needs to be assigned to it. This is very high level and only meant to be a summary…otherwise I’d be uploading my whole manual!

Start With The Assessment:

• Pull support tickets from the last month and look at frequently asked "obvious" questions, regional or demographic patterns that seem confusing, feature usage across user segments and commonly requested "missing" functionality

• Look into phrases from feedback like “in our company/industry/region, we usually…”

• You might also review onboarding completion rates across user segments

• Behavioural Pattern Recognition

  • Look for users with unexpected usage patterns, high abandonment rates across segments and frequency of requests for customization (often seen as just one organisation or a group of undefined users)

  • Document how and where users are creating “workarounds” or hacks. A quick way to assess this is a search across Social Media with an emphasis on video services.
    
    Immediate Actions:

    • Spend the first week getting it all together, including the analytics for the top 5 features, a review of the last 50-100 support tickets and pull all the above and this bit together.

    • Based on your findings, you can then map cultural assumptions in product workflows

    • Create a cultural context matrix for key features

    • Map the workarounds and adaptations, finding the “unwritten” rules built into the product

    • Pull the team together and review the findings

    • You might also want to create a cultural debt score which = (Impact x Frequency x Scope), from there to where it ranks, such as;

      Where:

      Impact = Severity of friction (1-5)

      Frequency = How often issues occur (1-5)

      Scope = Number of users affected (1-5

      Priority Levels:

       75-125 (critical)

      50-74 High (plan for next sprint)

      25-49 (Medium (schedule for quarter)

      1-24 Low (but monitor)

You can determine the rankings as to where to place attention and then conduct such an audit on a quarterly basis. This is a simplified form of addressing cultural debt with SaaS and well, any software product or app!

It is also helpful for the business analyst to weigh in or whoever runs the analytics show on the team to determine the financial impacts in terms of both revenue and operations or CaPex. Ongoing, try building culture related questions into your UX research workflows from online focus groups and interviews to surveys and ratings.