As businesses continue to evolve in the digital era, it is becoming increasingly important to prioritize customer needs and preferences in product management. As such, product management has grown to become customer-centric in its approach. LoginRadius, a leading customer identity and access management (CIAM) platform uses customer-centric product management at the core of its product development process to drive success.
This approach helps align the research and development of LoginRadius CIAM with evolving customer needs to offer a technically superior digital identity platform that meets market demands.
Here, I write about how the Product Management team delivers a world-class CIAM experience by validating customer needs, implementing new capabilities while reducing product complexity, and ensuring a shorter time to go-to market.
Customer-Centric Product Framework
Validating customer needs in the ever evolving world of technology is crucial for any product management team, and the team at LoginRadius is no exception.
Our Product team established a new product framework based on industry best practices to build a structured approach to understand, validate, and align customer needs with product development efforts.
The key steps of our product framework are as follows:
- gather customer feedback
- validate against the product and company strategy
- conduct market research
- use the data collected to inform product decisions
- provide a clear roadmap for product development
- ensure all stakeholders are aligned with the goals and priorities
Following this approach helps avoid assumptions and wasting time and resources on features not aligned with customer needs.
Overall, the framework has played a significant role in ensuring that we continue to deliver a world-class CIAM platform for our customers without over-engineering it.
Reducing Complexity
Based on insights captured from customer and interdepartmental collaboration, our Product Management team discovered that the number of features available in the platform made the product overly complex and lead to the following problems:
- It took longer for customers to familiarize themselves with the platform
- Product performance and scalability during peak times were impacted
- Release cycles were lengthier from an engineering and development perspective
- The need to test unused features made for a cumbersome QA process
- Training and onboarding processes were more prolonged for new hires
Once the overcomplexity issue was identified, we embarked on a product transformation journey to ensure our identity platform becomes leaner by deprecating unnecessary features and optimizing product architecture.
At the same time, we made sure these changes didn’t impact existing customers but also elevated the performance and scaled the capabilities of the simplified platform to efficiently handle even the most demanding use cases and workloads.
The following is a chart that compares the before and after request and response per second of our APIs from a benchmark stress testing:
The Product Management team put in a lot of effort to implement this transformation. The team conducted research and analysis, built use cases, and collaborated with different teams across the whole company to help ensure the transition was well-informed, well-planned, and well-executed.
As a result, the team was able to:
- Optimize cost, system stability, product maintainability, and technical productivity
- Deprecate hundreds of no longer relevant test cases, which simplified QA processes, shortened testing timelines, reduced test script maintenance, and accelerated time-to-release
- Train and onboard new hires quickly and efficiently
Improving the User Experience
On-screen help is the first place a customer looks for support while configuring and using any website. Our Product Management team identified areas of the LoginRadius Admin Console that were customer pain points by collecting feedback and analyzing data.
Once the key problems were identified, they and worked extensively to improve the support available to the customer in those areas by adding new help options and enhancing the existing ones. Here are a few highlights of the improvements:
- Navigational auto-suggestion search for customers to easily locate features and configurations
- Advanced search options for customers’ support teams to more conveniently find their users
- Prominent positioning of instructions and tips on screen next to the relevant section
As a result, our customers can more intuitively understand how to navigate our admin interface and better leverage various functionalities and features.
Amplifying Customer Relation
Our team's customer-centric product management and initiatives have immensely improved our platform and contributed to delivering our product strategy. With this achievement, we have observed no customer churn due to our CIAM platform capabilities, as it remains robust and technically superior.
KuppingerCole Analysts, a trusted advisor for identity and security solutions, has named us leaders in all major categories within their September 2022 Leadership Compass report:
Originally published on LinkedIn
Deepak Gupta
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