SaaS Product Feels Complex? Give It a Spine

Complex vs. Confusing

Call a product “complex” and most people picture Byzantine business logic and edge cases breeding in the basement. In practice, when founders and PMs say *complex*, they usually mean the UX is sagging under its own weight. Releases slow down.

New screens don’t feel related to old ones. Users wander; support starts doing guided tours. The instinct is to blame the size of the thing. The reality is simpler, and more fixable: it isn’t modular yet.

What “Modular” Really Means

By modular I don’t mean a cathedral of tokens and a 200‑page design system. Those are wonderful when you have the headcount to maintain them and a codebase that changes quarterly, not hourly. Early and mid‑stage teams rarely do.

Modularity, at this stage, is a shared way the product behaves. It’s rhythm. It’s knowing that adding, editing, deleting, undoing, confirming and recovering have a predictable feel wherever you are. When a product is modular, users don’t need a map; they recognise the music.

How Fake Complexity Shows Up

You can feel the lack of it long before anyone writes a post‑mortem. Designers rebuild the same idea five slightly different ways because each feature was designed in isolation. A brand‑new flow lands and quietly breaks the rules an older one taught.

The backlog fills with tiny UX debts that never make the sprint because none of them is catastrophic on its own. Copy wanders mid‑journey because nobody quite owns the voice, so one modal tries to be witty while the next reads like a GDPR letter.

None of this is proof that your problem space is too hard. It’s proof that the product doesn’t yet have a shared spine.

Design Flows, Not Screens

The shift begins with flows, not components. A button is not a pattern; a flow is. If you design screens as self‑contained artboards, you get pretty artefacts and brittle journeys. If you design around outcomes, you start to treat “add”, “edit”, “delete”, “undo”, “recover” and “where next?” as first‑class citizens.

You notice that a confirm can be spare and specific; that a success needs to offer a door, not a high‑five; that an error should tell the truth and provide a remedy in one breath. The individual components matter, but only as instruments in a piece the user can actually play.

Make Language a System

Language is part of the spine. A product that calls the same object a *workspace* on Monday, a *hub* on Tuesday and a *dashboard* on Wednesday is burning trust for sport. Modularity doesn’t only mean reusable UI; it means reusable meaning.

Pick names, write short definitions, and then use them relentlessly. You’ll find that navigation labels start writing themselves, empty states stop apologising for existing, and support spends less time translating product dialects for puzzled customers.

Connect Design and Code (Lightly)

Code and design have to talk, but not through a Notion labyrinth. Modularity at this stage looks like a small set of shared components in Figma that map to real, living code; usage notes written next to the thing they describe, not buried in a wiki; and a weekly half‑hour where someone opens the actual app and walks the team through what shipped.

That’s it.

No ceremony.

No manifesto.

Just enough connective tissue to stop reinvention by accident.

What You Get When It’s Modular

Once the product has that shared spine, everything moves faster. New features are composed from familiar moves instead of invented from scratch. Users understand new screens because they feel like cousins, not strangers. Founders and PMs can think about value rather than layout because the layout mostly takes care of itself.

Even the arguments change: you spend fewer cycles debating whether a cancel button should live left or right because the product already decided last quarter, and it’s been quietly teaching users ever since.

Common Traps

There are traps, and they are predictable. Consistency doesn’t redeem a bad pattern; it institutionalises it. If your modal logic is clunky, modularising it will only help that clunk spread faster. Minimal isn’t the same as modular either. Stripping a screen to bare chrome doesn’t give you clarity; it gives you vagueness.

People still need guidance and context, just delivered in familiar shapes. And documentation is not understanding. A beautifully formatted page of rules won’t save you if the team never talks about how the product behaves, or if the code ignores the decisions the document implies. Modularity is a habit that shows up in conversations and pull requests as much as in design files.

Predictability, Not Sameness

The aim is not sameness; it’s predictability. Users should be able to delete something the same way everywhere, not because you worship symmetry but because confidence comes from knowing what will happen when they click.

They should meet the same tone of voice in a help modal and on a confirmation screen, not because branding demands it, but because switching from humour to bureaucracy mid‑journey is a quiet form of gaslighting.

Predictability shrinks cognitive load, which is another way of saying it gives people their attention back for the work they came to do.

Start Small (and Prove It)

If you’re worried this sounds like yet another project, keep it small. Start with one messy flow and make it modular. Pick your “add” pattern and use it twice.

1. Pick your confirm and ship it in three places.
2. Rename one object everywhere and delete the synonyms.
3. Move one reversible setting out of the dungeon and into the flow where it matters.
4. Pair a designer and a developer for a morning to replace a patchwork of buttons with one real component wired to one real variant.
5. Then look at the numbers you already track: fewer support pings, shorter time to first value, less fiddling to complete the same task.

That’s modularity earning its keep.

___

Most early‑stage teams don’t need a capital‑D Design System.

They need a product that behaves like itself. Modularity gives you that without the ceremony: fewer reinventions, fewer arguments, fewer surprises.

The product feels easier to use, easier to build, easier to change. Which is to say, the problem was never complexity. It was noise. Give the thing a spine and the noise drops. The work gets clearer. And the word *complex* quietly leaves the room, which is all most users ever wanted.