Nobody gets promoted to Head of Marketing and suddenly develops a love of complicated software.
They’re still a person. They still have too much to do. They still get annoyed when changing something that looks simple requires a tutorial, a support ticket and someone called Dave who understands the system.
Yet when we talk about building for enterprises, we sometimes forget this. We picture sophisticated users with sophisticated requirements, and somehow end up assuming they want a sophisticated interface.
Mostly, they want to get something done and get on with their day.
I've spent years teaching beginners how to use WordPress. One thing that keeps coming up is how much of what helps a beginner also helps everybody else. Clear language. Sensible defaults. Fewer decisions before you can start. Being able to see what you’re changing.
These things remain useful however experienced you become.
Expertise doesn’t remove someone’s appreciation of simplicity. It often makes them more aware of how much time a tool is wasting.
And expertise is specific. Someone can run a department, manage a huge budget and understand their industry inside out, while having absolutely no idea how to update the company website.
They’re an expert at their job. They’re a beginner at this particular task.
That’s a much bigger audience than we sometimes acknowledge.
There’s a messaging lesson here too.
Teams worry that making a product sound accessible to beginners will put off more experienced customers. That if the website says “Create a beautiful website without any technical knowledge”, someone at a large company will decide it isn’t serious enough.
But that person might read it and think: “Good. That’s exactly what I need.”
The beginner understands the promise. The experienced person understands it too. Neither has to translate “an extensible digital experience platform” into something they might actually do on Tuesday.
You don’t even have to call people beginners. Just make the promise understandable to one.
Canva is a useful example. Making design accessible to people without design training turned out to have plenty of relevance inside large organisations. In its 2024 review, Canva reported that more than 95% of Fortune 500 companies were using it, the same year it launched Canva Enterprise. Source: Canva
That doesn’t prove simplicity was the only reason for its growth. But it does make it difficult to argue that being approachable limits you to small or inexperienced customers.
A person inside a corporation still needs to make a presentation, create a graphic or get something ready for a meeting. A tool that makes that easy has an opportunity to win them over, even if they weren’t the customer pictured in the original marketing plan.
They try it. They make something useful. They show a colleague.
That’s a powerful way for a product to spread.
The “almost” in the title matters, of course. Large organisations need permissions, security, governance and all sorts of capabilities that an individual might never use. Specialist work sometimes requires specialist tools.
But those requirements don’t mean every person should have to navigate all that complexity every time they open the product.
Build the depth. Make it available when people need it. Keep the everyday experience clear.
Beginners are particularly useful people to build for because they expose the assumptions experienced users have learned to work around. They ask why something is called that. They can’t find the button. They don’t understand why there are three different places to change the same thing.
Fix those problems and you improve the product for the people who had quietly been putting up with them.
Build for beginners, and you may find that some of your most enthusiastic customers are experts who are relieved they don’t have to become experts in your software too.
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