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Product management- the art and science of decision making


typical product meeting

 

A simple task of user authentication can be quite daunting not in terms of designing and development but in terms of choosing the best way for the product

It depends on the stage of the product we are in and also on the type of product

Let me try to put my point as a conversation among various stakeholders.

Product — — — — - ----product manager 

Marketing — — — — ---Marketing team

Quality — — — — — —Quality assurance team (testing team)

Random — — — — — --Random guy 

Tech — — — — — — — Tech team 

Product: Guys let's have a short meeting to discuss the new feature we are going to have in our upcoming sprints “user authentication and login”. I am open to suggestions.

Marketing: we need to authenticate the user using the conventional method of email and password, we would get the user's email id and I would bug them later if they stop using our product😁

Tech: easy peasy

Product: but for that, we have so many steps, I guess we are going to lose users there, dau would come down drastically

Random: why do we need email IDs?

Marketing: To retarget users when they are gone

Random: once the user is gone, they are gone they don't come back👀.

Product: let us authenticate users using mobile no. and OTP. it is most convenient for the user, and we would have minimum user drop.

Marketing: SMS is very costly, and expenses would go up.

Quality: hey guys I think we can use what's  app for sending OTP

Marketing: But we need the email id of all users, using mobile no. Would not solve this problem.

Random: why can't we authenticate users by their biometric fingerprints/face scans?

Tech: yes, it is an upcoming technology, we should use the latest tech in our product. But it would need time to develop as it is a new thing, and the team would require some learning time.

Product: we are not a banking app and users would be hesitant to use biometric authentication, we may have a poor UX and increase uninstalls

Marketing: All these methods would not give us email ids

Product: we can ask for an email id as part of the profile and the user would voluntarily fill in that

Marketing: All users would not fill it, we need all users to get max leverage

Product: can we choose the route of email id and OTP to send on email? In this way, we would get the email ids of all users. Since it requires only two steps, it would be much fast than the conventional sign-up using email id, id verification, and then entering the password twice, etc.

Random: sometimes emails take more than 5 minutes to arrive, and we would lose customers waiting for OTP.

Ohoo such a difficult thing

I am sure you have faced such situations many times in your career, most of us face this on a daily basis.

The bookish solution to this problem is to get data and make an excel sheet to do a cost-benefit analysis and select the one which is giving the best ROI but in most cases, this is not possible as we may not be having data points of all these cases

 

The second most popular solution is to do ab testing of all the solutions. Not suggested one as it takes a lot of time and resources

Here comes some thumb rule in the picture, the experience to roll out options.

1: If your product is in the early stage and does not have many active users it's better to get some users to gauge other offerings of the product. In such cases just give some simple easy authentication option and put optimization of authentication in the backlog

E.g, an early-stage photo editing app

 

2: If the product is a banking app or involves financial transactions then it’s always better to authenticate the user and use two-factor authentication

E.g, Banking app

 

3: If your monetization strategy is to earn from ads, authentication is not necessary until you want to give a very personalizes user experience

E.g, News, and media site

4: If you have something to sell (physical/virtual), it makes a lot of sense to get the email id of visitors so that you can retarget them later via email, which is very cost-effective.

5: If you are in the latter stage of the product where you got 10-15 k DAU and now want to switch gears to start a subscription and paid services, then it makes sense to give sign-up as an optional option for users and mandatory if they want to use paid service.

 

These are just shortcuts best way is to write down your requirement first and then analyze which solution fits the bill with all pros and cons.

to make mistakes is human, to rise from mistakes is supper human 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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