Executive SharePoint portals look impressive. They demo well. They photograph nicely. And then they get quietly ignored.

I have seen this pattern repeat for years. A portal is designed around leadership needs, leadership language, and leadership assumptions. High-level messaging. KPIs. Vision statements. Strategic links. All technically correct, and almost completely unused.

The problem is not effort. It is audience.

Most people who open SharePoint every day are not executives. They are project managers, analysts, coordinators, operations staff, and subject matter experts trying to get work done. When a portal is designed for leadership first, it often fails the people who actually live in the platform.

This is where user stories and personas matter, even though they are often treated like workshop artifacts that never make it into real design decisions. Microsoft has long encouraged the use of personas and scenarios as part of its Microsoft Adoption framework, but many organizations stop at documentation instead of letting those personas shape what gets built.

When you design with real user stories in mind, the questions change. What does someone need to do at 9:12 a.m. when a deadline is looming. Where do they go when they need the latest version of a file. How do they recover when something goes wrong. Executive dashboards rarely answer those questions.

Another contributing factor is the assumption that business owner and site owner are the same thing. On paper, it makes sense. In reality, it often does not. The business owner cares about outcomes. The site owner deals with structure, permissions, content sprawl, and daily friction.

When those roles are treated as interchangeable, portals tend to reflect priorities instead of behavior. What leadership wants to communicate outweighs how people actually work. Over time, the portal becomes a broadcast surface rather than a working space.

SharePoint does not fail here. Design does.

The most successful SharePoint portals I have seen flip the model. They design for the busiest users first. The people who create, edit, search, and collaborate all day. Executives still benefit from those portals, but indirectly, through better data, cleaner content, and fewer workarounds.

This approach aligns closely with Microsoft’s guidance on information architecture in modern SharePoint, which emphasizes task-based navigation and clarity over hierarchy and status.

When portals are built around real work, adoption follows naturally. Users return because the portal helps them do their job, not because they were told to use it.

We are starting to see the same pattern repeat itself with newer tools. Copilot licenses, for example, are often handed to executives first, even though the biggest day-to-day productivity gains usually come from people creating documents, managing projects, and synthesizing information all day. The technology is different, but the mindset is familiar.

Designing for visibility instead of utility rarely pays off.

SharePoint works best when it is built for the many, not the few. When portals are designed around real work instead of org charts, they stop being impressive demos and start becoming tools people actually trust.

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This post is part of my 25 days of SharePoint series, created to celebrate SharePoint’s 25th anniversary and lead up to the SharePoint at 25 digital event on March 2.

Each post reflects on what actually made SharePoint last 25 years, the wins, the mistakes, and the lessons learned from building, breaking, and rebuilding it in real organizations.

You can find all posts in this series here.

If there’s a topic you think I should cover next, a SharePoint mistake you keep seeing, or a question no one ever answers straight, leave a comment. This series is shaped by real experiences, not marketing slides.