The paradox of productivity tools

Before building Wilson, I qualified and worked as a lawyer. I’d seen first-hand how much time legal professionals spend buried in administrative work, redlining contracts, tracking terms in spreadsheets, and manually updating systems that were supposed to automate their job.

The irony was that most “productivity” tools didn’t save time. They just moved the complexity around.

I’ve met teams who spent an entire year implementing new contract management systems, only to discover that the time they’d lost setting it up outweighed the time they were meant to save. The software promised speed, but came with configuration fatigue built on new forms to fill out, new meta-tags to label, and new training materials.

It’s a trap that many of us as founders fall into too. We design tools that optimise processes but forget about people. True productivity is about removing friction as much as adding capability.

Cognitive load is the silent killer of adoption

Cognitive load is a term from psychology that describes the total mental effort used in working memory. In product terms, it’s the measure of how much thinking a user has to do to get value from your product. Too much, and they churn.

When we were early in development, we noticed something interesting. Legal teams didn’t resist AI because they feared it, they resisted it because it felt like work. Setting up, prompting, or verifying outputs took more effort than just doing the task manually. So we designed Wilson to get value from the first click. A lawyer uploads a document, and Wilson starts helping instantly, extracting key terms, flagging risks, suggesting changes, and showing exactly where each point came from in the source text.

That first moment, the “aha” of instant value, is crucial for any founder building a product in a complex industry.It doesn’t matter how powerful your backend is if it takes 20 minutes to explain. One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that usability isn’t just a design problem, it’s a growth strategy. Reducing cognitive load reduces time-to-value. And the faster users see value, the faster you grow.

Simplicity scales, complexity doesn’t

As founders, it’s tempting to think that adding more features equals progress. But every new toggle, dashboard, and configuration is another point of friction, another thing to explain.

The products that scale are the ones that simplify as they grow. The ones that require no manual, no walkthrough, no explanation, because they just work.

That’s the biggest lesson I’ve learned building Wilson: Complexity is inevitable. But it’s our job as founders to carry that complexity so our users don’t have to.

When you design for zero cognitive load, you’re not just making better UX, you’re building trust, speed, and adoption into your product’s DNA. And in any industry where trust is everything, that’s what really scales.