Sage provides businesses with simple, easy-to-use software and services. Customers trust their Payroll, HR, and Finance software to make business flow with ease.
Software
5k+
Sage had an opportunity to move faster for small business customers by enabling more frequent experimentation, iteration, and fixes alongside engineering cycles. Product insights weren’t always connected across teams, creating a clear opportunity to accelerate meaningful improvement.
Sage turned Pendo into a growth engine, giving designers and product teams control to ship, test, and personalize in-app experiences without code. Dedicated growth teams used guides and experiments to iterate in minutes and scale what worked.
Sage delivered 10-minute product fixes, value messaging with over 90% positive feedback, and a 1,000% lift in a key payments metric. Teams now own growth and live product control, driving the team’s strongest results to date.
Sage is one of the world's largest providers of accounting, financial, HR, and payroll technology, serving over 6 million customers globally, from solo entrepreneurs to large enterprises. Sage has built its reputation on helping businesses of all sizes manage their finances, operations, and people more efficiently. Its mission is to knock down barriers so everyone can thrive.
Ben Wilson, director of experience design at Sage, leads a team of approximately 35 UX and content designers dedicated to serving Sage's small business customers — including sole traders and small business owners who took the brave step of starting their own ventures. His customers didn't start their businesses to handle administrative tasks — they started them to practice their craft or provide for their families. Wilson's mission is to unlock time for them to do what they love, not wrestle with business software.
Over the past 18 months, Sage has evolved its Pendo practice into a sophisticated growth engine that drives significant business impact and accelerates adoption across its user base.
The journey happened organically, growing with the organization's needs and proving capabilities before scaling them across the team.
Sage's Pendo journey began with a simple but powerful shift—giving everyone on the team direct visibility into user behavior and product usage patterns with Pendo.
Next came Guides for onboarding experiences. The appeal was immediate: the design team could respond and build faster than with native code, iterating without waiting for development cycles.
But the real transformation came when Sage created a dedicated growth team. The creation of a dedicated team, combined with Pendo's expanding capabilities, unlocked breakthrough results.
One of Sage’s most impactful experiments repositioned Pendo as a personalization engine, delivering tailored value to individual users. By applying behavioral science and in-app guidance, the team highlighted personalized time and cost savings linked to users’ behavior and AI adoption, driving strong retention of AI feature users.
Rapid thumbs-up / thumbs-down feedback loops enabled fast iteration, while increased engagement led to higher participation in short research calls — bringing customers closer to product development and reinforcing Sage’s product-led growth strategy.
Wilson attributes the success to something beyond just metrics: “Just as important as the information we can pass to users through Pendo guides is the feeling of care and consideration for the user’s context that a guide can create.”
Sage has pushed Pendo's embedded guides to their limits, using them to reframe features within the product without waiting for full development cycles. The most dramatic example came from a new automation feature.
The team deployed four embedded guides working in concert to replace UI elements, change where options appeared in the user journey, and deliver timely, targeted messaging to clearly communicate the benefits of the feature. Wilson jokes that his designers became UI developers, orchestrating multiple guides together to transform the experience.
The results were staggering: One test variant made users 5,000 times more likely to start the journey compared to the control group.
Another team reached out asking what had changed and why so many more people were suddenly coming through the flow. The scientific approach clicked—and more stakeholders understood the power of rapid experimentation.
The team faced a challenge: how do you introduce an AI assistant in a way that feels natural and inviting?
Their solution was to use Pendo's code block capabilities with custom HTML and CSS to help Sage Copilot introduce itself. Instead of a generic message asking users to try the new AI feature, a simulation of Copilot could appear and demonstrate value in its own voice.
10-minute incident response
Perhaps the most innovative use case positions Pendo as a live incident response tool. If there’s ever any potential disruption to a live service, the design team can react in real-time with Pendo. They can reroute users and replace elements in the user interface, using backup features or alternatives. A fix can take just a few minutes.
This capability changes the design team's role. They're no longer just designing static assets — they're actively managing the live product experience, controlling its success, and responding to issues as they happen. As Wilson puts it: "I love the empowerment, and it feels like we're more in control of the product. Its success is in our hands, and that’s highly motivating to the team.”
The impact of Pendo extends well beyond metrics, it's changed how work gets done at Sage. Designers own more of the product experience than ever before. At the same time, Pendo empowers product managers to build UX quickly on their own, creating guides and pinging them to Wilson for feedback and collaboration.
This democratization has created a culture where experimentation is expected and failure is reframed as learning. Being able to test and learn with small segments of the user base minimizes risk,provides insights, and enables the team to experiment and deploy with confidence across the entire user base.
Wilson inherited a philosophy from early leadership at Sage: “No one will ever criticise you for trying something new to help users, even if it doesn’t work out. Even mistakes take us one step closer to success.” That psychological safety is critical for innovation.
Sage measures success across both quantitative and qualitative dimensions. On the quantitative side, they track key metrics aligned to business strategy, use Pendo's NPS feature for experience measurement, and tie success metrics to specific user behaviors.
But Wilson is equally focused on understanding the ‘why’ behind the numbers. Pendo Replay helps teams quality-assure what they've built and observe how features perform in real user workflows, with careful obfuscation and anonymization of user data. These learnings enable teams to iterate quickly and ensure they deliver the right experience for their customer base, informed by real-world usage rather than assumptions.
The Sage team uses Pendo to recruit customers for deeper conversations. When they personalise recruitment messaging, more people agree to participate, creating a virtuous cycle of learning.
Sage's Pendo practice has evolved from a single analytics tool into a comprehensive growth platform that touches multiple aspects of the product experience. The journey proves that transformation doesn't require revolution; it requires focus, experimentation, and a willingness to learn from what works.
The design team now has unprecedented control over product experience. They can ship improvements in minutes and can personalize at scale. They can respond to incidents in real-time. And they can experiment with confidence, knowing that psychological safety and scientific rigor work hand in hand.
Most importantly, they're not just building features, they're unlocking time for small business owners to do what they love. And that mission, powered by the right tools and the right culture, is what drives their best work.
