How to Spot a Weak Use Case Before It Costs You

In digital product development, failure rarely happens because a team lacks technical skill. More often, it happens quietly—when a product is built around an idea that sounds good but solves nothing meaningful. These are what we call weak use cases.

A business team actively participates in a problem-solving session, where they discuss strategies and analyze data in a meeting.

They often begin with data. Teams dive into dashboards and analytics, searching for patterns. A spike here, a drop-off there—and suddenly, a new project is born. But without pausing to ask the deeper questions, the solution may never create true value.

The Hidden Risk of Misguided Use Cases

In her book Digitized Product Management, Agathe Daae-Qvale introduces a nine-step framework for evaluating digital use cases. Step one is foundational: the problem. Without it, the entire structure falls apart.

“If the use case does not solve a human problem,” she writes, “it will be close to impossible to communicate the value to another human.”

The issue is not that teams don’t care about solving problems—it’s that many don’t stop to validate whether the problem is real, urgent, or even worth solving in the first place.

Take, for example, a company trying to cut operational costs by installing smart door sensors throughout a large office building. The idea is that open doors are causing heat loss, and by tracking them, energy bills can be reduced. Technically, the use case is viable. Sensors are cheap. Data is available. But is the underlying problem actually doors being left open? Or are there larger, more impactful inefficiencies elsewhere in the system?

Without confirming that this is a priority issue—one that management is willing to act on and invest in—the use case risks being shelved, or worse, quietly forgotten after launch.

Use Case Red Flags: What to Watch For

This kind of misstep plays out in SaaS environments as well. A product team might notice users dropping off after a few days and assume that onboarding is to blame. They design a series of tutorials and tooltips to fix it—but the churn remains unchanged. Only later do they discover that users weren’t confused at all; they just didn’t see the product’s value quickly enough. The problem wasn’t onboarding—it was messaging and positioning.

Weak use cases often pass as strong ones because they look good on paper. They come with impressive data, sleek prototypes, and well-intentioned teams. But if you dig just a little deeper, they usually reveal three warning signs:

1. The problem is vague or unverified.

2. The user pain point is theoretical, not real.

3. The business value is hard to explain.

These signs aren’t always obvious. That’s why the first step in Agathe’s framework is designed to challenge assumptions early—before budgets are spent and time is lost. It’s a simple but powerful shift: instead of asking, what can we build with this data?, ask, who are we helping, and why does it matter to them?

True innovation doesn’t come from complexity—it comes from clarity.

Want to avoid weak use cases before they start? Discover the full Nine Steps of Use Case Evaluation in Digitized Product Management by Agathe Daae-Qvale.