LMS Buyer’s Blind Spots: 6 Mistakes Smart Teams Still Make In 2025

Choosing a new learning platform is one of the most high-stakes decisions a training provider can make. The right LMS becomes an engine for growth. The wrong one becomes an operational constraint, a financial drain, and eventually something you have to replace.

Yet most teams approach LMS selection with a narrow view. They compare feature lists. They focus on short-term needs. They evaluate polished demos instead of the practical realities those demos rarely reflect. And they underestimate how decisions made early on will shape — or limit — what their business can do in the years that follow.

The result is a familiar pattern. Providers migrate from one SaaS tool to the next, attempt custom builds that stall, or end up with a platform that struggles under real usage. None of this is caused by lack of effort. It’s caused by blind spots in the decision-making process.

Below are six mistakes we see most often. Avoiding them will save you time, money, and years of unnecessary rework — regardless of whether you choose SaaS, custom, or something in between.

Underestimating how fast your needs will evolve (scalability)

When organisations choose an LMS, they tend to prioritise what they need right now. Current learner numbers. Current delivery model. Current reporting. It feels sensible. The problem is that successful learning businesses rarely stay still for long. Within twelve to eighteen months, most teams face new demands: new product lines, new markets, enterprise clients with specific requirements, hybrid delivery, or simply more learners than the original system was designed to handle.

This is where short-term decisions start to cause long-term friction. Many SaaS platforms look suitable on day one because the early use case is simple. As soon as the business grows or diversifies, limits start to appear around enrolment logic, data structures, permission models, content operations, and performance. These aren’t flaws. They are signs that the system was architected for a narrower set of scenarios.

Teams usually only recognise this once they have outgrown the platform. By then they are already embedded in it: courses built, processes shaped, users trained, data accumulated. The result is a familiar pattern. They hop from one SaaS platform to another every few years, each time hoping the next tool will stretch a little further. The migrations are disruptive, expensive, and rarely solve the underlying issue, because the core assumption remains the same: choosing for today, not for where the business is heading.

The costs compound quickly. Migration fees, duplicated development, lost historical data, internal retraining, and months spent rebuilding content instead of improving it. For established training providers, this can stall momentum and delay strategic moves that depend on a more robust foundation.

The point is not to predict every future requirement. It is to choose a technology approach that can absorb change without forcing you into a new system every time your business evolves. 

Scalability is not only about handling more users. It is about having the architectural depth to support what your organisation will become.

Over-estimating how configurable SaaS systems really are

SaaS platforms often present themselves as highly flexible. Demo environments look polished. Feature lists appear broad enough to cover most scenarios. It creates the impression that you can adapt the system to your organisation with minimal compromise.

The real test begins after the contract is signed. Once teams start mapping genuine workflows, delivery models, compliance requirements, and reporting expectations onto the system, the limits reveal themselves quickly. Most SaaS tools are designed around a standard set of patterns that suit the middle of the market. Anything that requires non-standard enrolment rules, role-specific experiences, multi-market logic, hybrid delivery, or organisation-level personalisation tends to push beyond the boundaries the platform was built for.

At that point the challenge is not simply functional. It is contractual. Buyers often discover these constraints only after committing to multi-year agreements. They are then locked into a platform that cannot support key parts of their learning strategy, which forces uncomfortable trade-offs. Teams start designing workarounds. They buy additional software to plug the holes. Processes shift to suit the software rather than the business. Learner experience becomes fragmented. Growth plans slow because the platform cannot evolve with them.

This is simply the cost of choosing a system optimised for consistency across thousands of customers rather than precision for one. A SaaS vendor’s goal is scale and providing a truly personalised service is at odds with that. 

Treating an LMS like a standard web project

Many organisations assume that any capable digital agency can build an LMS. Sometimes they bring in the agency that built their marketing site. Other times they hire a new agency that looks solid on general web work but has never delivered a learning platform before.

In both cases, the same problem tends to surface. LMS architecture is significantly more complex than it appears from the outside. Permission layers, data models, reporting requirements, content operations, enrolment logic, hybrid delivery, and integrations all compound. Agencies without this background often go in with genuine confidence but quickly realise the scope is far bigger than expected.

The result is not a platform that launches and later shows weaknesses. It is a platform that struggles to reach launch at all. Timelines stretch, requirements balloon, features stall, and teams get trapped in rounds of rework because early architectural choices cannot support the real needs of the training business. The budget follows the same trajectory, often doubling or trebling as the project tries to correct course.

Relying on an LMS that you don’t control

Many organisations choose a platform based on features and pricing without considering who ultimately controls the system. In most SaaS models, you lease access to the platform rather than investing in something that becomes part of your long-term infrastructure. That distinction only becomes visible when the business starts to grow or change direction.

The first challenge is continuity. Your entire learning operation depends on the vendor’s decisions. Pricing changes, acquisitions, product shifts, and roadmap resets all land directly on your organisation with no practical recourse. For training providers who rely on the LMS as a core product, this creates a structural dependency that can be difficult to unwind.

A second issue appears when organisations invest in custom workflows or integrations inside a SaaS platform. Those enhancements usually cannot be taken with you. The moment the contract ends, the work ends with it. Years of development become sunk cost, and teams find themselves rebuilding from scratch on the next platform.

Per user pricing introduces another form of lock-in. It looks manageable early on, but as learner numbers rise or new markets open up, the model becomes increasingly expensive. Over time, the cost of staying outweighs the cost of moving, yet migration becomes harder because so much of the organisation’s operations sit inside the tool.

For established training providers, there’s a bigger implication. A platform you do not control cannot contribute to the value of the business. It is not an asset. It cannot support an exit strategy. And it cannot be shaped around the organisation as it evolves.

Control is not about owning code for the sake of owning code. It is about ensuring that the investment you make in your platform remains yours, that your workflows and data are portable, and that your long-term plans are not constrained by a contract cycle.

Designing an LMS for stakeholders instead of the people who actually use it

A surprising number of LMS projects are designed around assumptions rather than real users. Stakeholders list features, developers interpret them, and everyone hopes it will make sense once learners arrive.

The trouble is that learning platforms have very different behavioural patterns from standard web applications. Learners don’t move in straight lines. Managers need clarity, not dashboards filled with raw data. Instructors and content teams rely on workflows that rarely appear in initial requirements. And the people who actually use the platform day to day often have no voice in early decisions.

Without proper user experience consideration, several predictable issues appear.

Developers end up making design decisions because no one else has defined the flows. Generalist designers create interfaces that look good but don’t support the realities of learning delivery. Teams assume that common SaaS patterns represent best practice, when in fact they’re often compromises made for scale. And because few projects include genuine user research, the platform becomes shaped around internal assumptions rather than actual behaviour.

This leads to systems that technically work but create friction at every touchpoint. Learners drop off because the system gets in the way. Managers can’t find the information they need without manual Excel juggling. Admins find their workload dominated by platform friction instead of learner impact. And the cost of correcting these issues after development is significantly higher than designing the right flows upfront.

Effective LMS UX isn’t about visuals but rather is about understanding real behaviour across every user group (learners, trainers, managers, content teams, B2B clients), and designing the system around the way people actually work.

Starting a custom LMS without a clear long-term product strategy

Once organisations choose a custom LMS, they often jump straight into design or development. The assumption is that because they know what their current platform is missing, the path forward is obvious.

In practice, custom LMS projects rarely fail on technology. They fail on misalignment, hidden complexity, and decisions made too early without understanding how they affect year two and year three of the product. Learning platforms sit at the intersection of content, operations, reporting, commercial strategy, and customer experience. If the foundations are not right, the cost of correcting them later is far higher than the cost of defining them upfront.

That’s why we start every custom build with a dedicated product strategy phase we call the Blueprint. It’s a structured process that gives you clarity before committing to development. It brings every stakeholder into alignment, validates assumptions against real user and business needs, maps the evolution of the platform over time, and defines the architecture required to support that evolution.

Teams who skip this stage usually end up discovering their unknowns in development rather than before it. That’s when delays, rework, and budget creep become unavoidable. We see this most often when organisations come to us after an unsuccessful attempt elsewhere. The pattern is consistent: the vision was solid, but the foundations were not.

A well-run strategy phase doesn’t slow the project down. It removes the guesswork so the build can move faster and stay on track. And most importantly, it reduces the risk of needing to rethink major parts of the system twelve months after launch.

If you’re exploring a custom LMS, the simplest next step is to walk through what a strategy phase would look like for your organisation. A short conversation is enough to clarify whether this approach fits your goals.

Book a call or explore the Blueprint

There's an easy way to avoid these mistakes

A modern LMS isn’t a one-off project but rather a long-term product that powers your content, operations, commercial strategy, and learner experience. When the foundations are right, everything you build on top becomes easier, faster, and more scalable. When they’re not, the cost of correcting course grows exponentially.

If you’re exploring a custom build or considering a shift away from a SaaS learning platform, the next step is simply getting clarity with a team that has built 200+ successful learning platforms. 

Our Blueprint phase exists for that reason. It gives you a solid product strategy before you invest in development — reducing risk, surfacing unknowns, and ensuring the decisions you make now still make sense when your business has doubled in scope.

If you want to understand what this would look like for your organisation, you can talk with us or explore the Blueprint in more detail.