When we shipped Zenith the tenant sidebar had thirteen items. After three months of watching session recordings and reading support tickets, we cut it to eight. The five we removed weren't bad features. They were the wrong default surface for the people we'd actually attracted.
The cut list, in order of how long the argument took: Forms, Webhooks, Templates, SMTP, LLM Settings. Each had been a top-level destination in the tenant panel. Each is still in the product — most are still in the API. None of them belonged in the primary nav of a CRM that gets opened to triage submissions, not to configure them.
The 80/20 we actually saw
We pulled three weeks of session data before deciding. The shape was the same across every tenant cohort: Submissions, Flagged, and Analytics accounted for roughly 80% of clicks. Templates and SMTP combined accounted for under 2%. Forms and Webhooks were configured once during onboarding and almost never touched again.
Every item in a sidebar costs attention from every user, in exchange for serving the few who need it. The math gets worse as the list grows.
Where the power users went
The risk with any nav cut is that you ship a friendlier-looking product to your casual users by stealing minutes from the people who keep you in business. We did three things to make the move survivable for them.
- Kept the routes alive. Every URL we removed from the sidebar still resolves. Bookmarks, deep links, and onboarding docs didn't break the day we shipped.
- Surfaced settings contextually. Webhook config now lives inside the submission detail view, next to the events it would fire on. Templates moved into the smart reply flow. The configuration shows up at the moment you'd want it, not as a separate destination.
- Added a single 'Settings' entry. SMTP and LLM keys collapsed into one nav item. Less visible, but still one click from anywhere.
What changed
Time-to-first-action on a fresh tenant dropped by roughly a third. We can't fully attribute that to the nav — we shipped a few onboarding changes the same week — but the support tickets that used to say 'where do I see my submissions' stopped arriving. The tickets we get now are about the submissions themselves, which is the kind of question we want to be answering.
If your sidebar has more than eight items, one of two things is true: you're serving a genuinely complex product where every section earns its slot, or you're using the nav as a feature graveyard. Look at your top three destinations. If they're under 80% of clicks, you have room to cut.