☕ SharePoint Tip #27 — Common pain points every SharePoint PO must know how to fix

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Good morning! Here is your 15-minute SharePoint tip for today.

Day 27 | Week 4 — Product Owner Mastery

Common SharePoint Pain Points and How to Fix Them

Every SharePoint environment has the same handful of recurring problems. Knowing these in advance — and their fixes — makes you look like an expert from day one.

Pain point 1: "I can’t find anything"

Symptoms: Users rely on "ask a colleague" instead of search. Deep folder structures with cryptic names.

Fix: Flatten the folder structure. Add metadata columns. Improve file naming conventions. Configure result sources to scope search to relevant sites. Run a "search quality" review quarterly.

Pain point 2: "SharePoint is slow"

Symptoms: Pages load slowly, file operations feel sluggish.

Fix: Usually a page with too many web parts or a library with 5,000+ files in a single view. For large libraries, create indexed columns and filtered views. For slow pages, reduce the number of web parts or break content across multiple pages.

Pain point 3: "I don’t know who to contact about this site"

Symptoms: Sites with no visible ownership. Users can’t get access or resolve issues.

Fix: Every site must display its owner. Add a "Contact" web part to the site homepage. Enforce site ownership as a governance requirement — no owner = site gets archived.

Pain point 4: "I accidentally deleted something"

Symptoms: Panic. IT helpdesk ticket. Urgent recovery request.

Fix: Train all users to check the Recycle Bin first — they can self-serve 95% of recoveries. For the remaining 5%, site owners can check the second-stage recycle bin. Set up a "SharePoint self-help" page explaining this step by step.

Pain point 5: "I can’t edit this file, it’s locked"

Symptoms: "The file is checked out" or "Someone else is editing this."

Fix: Usually a co-authoring session that didn’t close cleanly. The file owner or library manager can discard the check-out. As a preventive measure, train users to always close files properly and avoid using the "Open in desktop app" and "Keep" options carelessly.

Pain point 6: "The permissions are a mess"

Symptoms: Random individuals with unique permissions everywhere. Nobody knows who has access to what.

Fix: This is inherited technical debt. Run a permissions report (use a tool like Sharegate or Microsoft Entra access reviews). Rationalise to group-based permissions. Break the habit: never assign permissions to individuals — always through groups.

Try it today (5 minutes)

Pick the one pain point from the list above that is most common in your organisation right now. Write a backlog item for it with a clear acceptance criterion. Then fix it this week. Visible, quick problem-solving is the fastest way to build credibility as a new Product Owner.

See you tomorrow at 6:00 AM with Tip #28 — SharePoint certifications and learning resources!