Case study
Pensight builds tools for independent educators and coaches who sell their own sessions and content. They wanted to understand how the product reads to the person they built it for, rather than to the team that built it.
They asked me to review the platform from inside the market it sells to: an independent educator earning through a marketplace and weighing up whether to build something of her own. That is not a user I had to imagine. I have taught online for years, and I have made exactly that move.
I am also based in a country their payment system does not currently reach, which turned out to sit at the centre of the review, because it was the one thing the team could not test from inside the product.
The review covered ten tasks, a written report, a recorded walkthrough and an advisory session.
1
Ten tasks in a fixed order, across four sittings and three hours inside the product.
I signed up, built a lesson with a price on it, checked the payout setup, set my availability, attached a digital product, built a monthly arrangement, opened the public page as a stranger, tested cancellation and time zones, and ran a live call.
Everything was built privately. No real card details were entered, and wherever real money would have moved, I stopped.
The rule I set myself was simple: when I got stuck, I stayed stuck.
Looking up the answer would have removed part of what I was trying to measure. If a user has to stop and work out what to do next, that is part of the experience. How long something takes to work out is not an obstacle to the finding. It is the finding.
2
Two browsers, two email addresses, and a product priced at zero so I could buy it from myself.
Most reviews test the side the client asked about. I wanted to see what happened after that too.
The same rule applied here. I set the price to zero, then bought my own product as a student in a separate browser with a separate identity, and carried on from that side to see what a buyer could actually do next.
Some of the findings only became visible once I had moved into the second seat, which is why looking only at the seller’s experience would not have been enough.
3
About a hundred minutes of narrated screen recording, with a live log written during the work.
I talked while I worked, so moments of hesitation were captured as they happened rather than reconstructed afterwards.
The log recorded what I was trying to do, what actually happened, whether I hesitated and for how long. It was written during the sessions, not at the end of the weekend.
That is not a procedural detail.
Once you know how something turned out, the route to it looks more obvious than it did at the time. A report written from memory can quietly remove the confusion it is supposed to document.
4
Twenty-eight findings, grouped into three bands by commercial consequence.
Before each task, I estimated how long it should take. Afterwards, I recorded the actual time.
The two tasks I completed and timed properly took exactly twice as long as I had expected: an hour instead of thirty minutes. I have worked online in this field for years, I am comfortable with software, and I had already watched the product’s own introduction video.
That gave me a useful reference point. If I was already familiar with this kind of work and still needed twice as long as expected, an educator trying the product for one free evening may not reach the third task.
The findings were then ordered by what each one costs the business, rather than by how irritating it was to encounter.
Something that quietly loses a customer before they ever sign up outranks something that annoys a customer you already have. The order of the work should reflect that.
One finding mattered more than the others, and it was not a usability problem.
Pensight’s payment setup does not reach South Africa.
At first, I had filed that in my own head as a missing feature, something that could sit behind other product work.
It is not a missing feature.
For a creator in a country Stripe does not reach, payouts are the gate. Nothing else about the product can really be judged until that problem is solved, and nothing spreads in that community until it is.
A barrier like that does not simply stop people. It removes them from the evidence.
People who meet the barrier leave before they can tell you why they left. Their problem therefore never appears in the feedback, never becomes a feature request and never shows up in the data from people who stayed.
That changes how the problem needs to be understood.
Ten things that worked were documented as carefully as the things that did not. Those findings stay with the client too.
A useful review should not simply produce a list of problems. It should show the team what is already working, what needs attention and where the difference lies.
The remaining twenty-seven findings stay with the client. This account names only the one Pensight has described publicly themselves.
After finishing the tasks, I read Pensight’s public feature request board, which had roughly ninety requests from paying customers.
Most of it agreed with what I had found, which was useful.
The more useful observation was what was missing.
Three of my findings appeared nowhere on the board. Not because they were small, but because everyone writing there had already signed up, already understood the product and already built something with it.
The people those findings describe were never in the sample.
So their problems could not appear on the board, however long you read it.
A channel can be full and still be deaf in exactly one direction.
This was one person, over one weekend, in one country, teaching one subject.
It offers depth rather than sample size, and it was designed to be read alongside the company’s own data rather than instead of it.
I am also not a typical user. I am comfortable with software, I run my own website and I deliberately went looking for the limits of the product. Where I struggled, someone less technical may struggle sooner.
The student purchase was made at zero cost, so what I tested was the journey after a completed order rather than the paid checkout itself.
Two tasks were left incomplete. I reported them as incomplete rather than quietly dropping them.
I did that because the point of the review was not to make the product look good or bad. It was to document what actually happened when someone tried to use it.
What a review like this can tell a company is the one thing its own data cannot: what the first hour feels like, and why someone who is not yet a customer decides the product is not for them.
“We went in thinking of payments as a ‘feature,’ and Nadia reframed it as a market-entry gate: for creators in Stripe-unsupported countries, payout support isn’t a nice-to-have. Nothing spreads in their community until it’s solved. That single reframing changed how we prioritize.”
“We expected a set of usability notes from a single call. What we actually got was far beyond that, a ~30-page structured analysis, a walkthrough presentation, and 12 screen recordings going through the real experience step by step. The depth and specificity were well above what we’d scoped.”
The client’s own answer is probably the clearest description of it:
“Founders and early product teams who are too close to their own product, especially anyone expanding into a user segment or market they don’t personally represent. The best moment is right around product-market fit: once the core is built but before you pour fuel into scaling, when an honest outside walkthrough can still redirect what you prioritize.”
Published with the written permission of Pensight Inc. The review report itself remains confidential.
15–30 minutes. English or German. Online worldwide.
Short answers to what most people want to know before booking.
Each engagement has a starting price, agreed with you before any work begins.
What moves the price is how much work happens outside the live sessions. Every engagement can also be booked in a lighter form, which costs less.
Rehearsal only. We use the call to practise material you have already written. No document review, research or written feedback beforehand.
Sessions only. For the Intensive and the Partnership, we work live in the sessions, without document review or preparation between them.
The full versions include the work I do between sessions: reviewing your draft, researching your audience, refining the structure, and written feedback. We agree the exact price in the free consultation, once I know what you actually need.
That depends on which engagement, and most of all on how much time there is before the moment you are preparing for.
Communication Audit. A week before your deadline is ideal. That leaves comfortable time to review your material, send the report, and rehearse before you deliver it.
Presentation Intensive. Two to three weeks works best, so the sessions can be spaced out properly rather than compressed at the last minute.
Communication Partnership. This one is ongoing, month to month. Most of the value builds over several months rather than in a single cycle.
If your timing is tighter than this, do get in touch anyway. It is often still possible.
Most people are more ready for this than they think.
You will get the most from the work if you can already hold a conversation in English, because we focus on how you use the language rather than teaching it from the beginning.
If your English is solid but not yet fluent, the Communication Partnership is often the best fit. It gives us time to build business vocabulary alongside structure, delivery and confidence, rather than preparing for a single event.
If you are not sure where you stand, the free consultation will make that clear very quickly, and you are most welcome to book one.
Not quite, though the two are easily confused.
I do not teach English from the ground up. Instead, we work on how you use the English you already have when it counts: how a presentation is structured, how a recommendation is made, which words carry authority, and how you handle the questions that follow.
You bring the expertise and the language. My work is making sure both of them land.
Online, over Google Meet. You will receive the link with your booking confirmation, and there is nothing to install.
Yes, and it is a good way to start. If your material is already written and you would simply like to practise delivering it, you can book the session time on its own.
There is no document review, research or written feedback beforehand, so it costs less than a full Audit or Intensive.
For a larger team, or for something more structured than a rehearsal, tell me what you are preparing for and I will come back with a price.
Yes, very happily. If a team is presenting together, or several colleagues are preparing for the same kind of moment, the rehearsal can be run as a group.
It works best with a small group, so that everyone gets real feedback rather than simply a turn to speak. It also tends to work best within one team, since you will be watching each other rehearse.
For a larger team, or for something more structured than a rehearsal, do tell me what you are preparing for and I will come back with a price.
Yes. The booking calendar shows my availability in your time zone as well as mine, so there is never confusion about when we are meeting.
My clients work across Europe, the Americas and beyond, so times outside standard European hours can usually be arranged.
A relaxed conversation of 15 to 30 minutes over Google Meet. It is not a test, and there is no need to prepare perfect English.
The call is there so I can understand what you are working on, rather than to begin the work itself, so we will not be doing any coaching or preparation in it.
I will ask a little about your role, your goals and the challenge in front of you. Towards the end I explain how I could help and answer anything you would like to ask, including about price.
There is no obligation to book afterwards, and the call is free either way. If you would like to get more out of it, there is a short guide on how to prepare.
Not at all. The consultation is simply there if you would like to talk things through before committing, and most people find it useful.
If you already know what you need, you are very welcome to book directly:
Please do say so, and as early as feels right. It is genuinely useful to know.
In most cases it means we are focusing on the wrong thing, and that is mine to put right rather than yours. A change of approach is usually all it takes.
If it still is not working after that, I would far rather tell you honestly than carry on regardless. The Partnership runs month to month with no lock-in, so you are free to stop at the end of any month.
Of course, and many clients are funded by their employer.
I invoice you, and you pass the invoice on to your company. It names the engagement only, so what we actually work on stays between the two of us.
Completely. Nothing you share with me is passed on to anyone else.
Your documents are never shared with anyone else. Protecting your material is central to this work rather than an afterthought.
Very little, because very little is collected. This website has no analytics, no cookies and no tracking of any kind, so reading it leaves no trace with me at all.
What I hold is what you send me: your booking details, our correspondence, and the materials we work on together. None of it is sold or shared for marketing.
The full detail, including how long I keep things and how to ask me to delete them, is in the privacy notice.
The free consultation can be in German or English, whichever feels more comfortable for you.
The coaching itself takes place in English, since English is where you need to perform. If something is easier to explain in German, we switch for a moment and then carry on.
Life happens, and moving a session is never a problem. A message as early as you can manage is all I need.
To move a session to another time in the same week, four hours’ notice is plenty. To cancel, or to move it beyond the current week, twelve hours’ notice.
Inside those windows I do have to charge for the session, simply because the time has already been set aside for you. If something unavoidable comes up, please do just talk to me.
Question not answered here? Email me at nadia@noreva-communications.com