The Critical Decision That Led to a Game-Changing MVP for Consumer Accounts

Uh, yeah, that's a great, that's a great question. Um, Gonna look I, I, I have an answer for this. Sorry, I, I just, I don't remember what it is. Um. Can you give me just a, just a second. Um, yeah, so, Great. So, great, good, good question. Um, it's, it's really common, um, when, when, actually, this, this happened to me when I was designing the Consumer Accounts and Persona service. Um, I was working with the product manager to uh define, like, he didn't have a really clear sense of what the what the customers wanted from this consumer accounts and persona service um immediately. Like we had the general idea of what it was that that we wanted to build, but we didn't have. Like we didn't have complete user journeys. We didn't have complete user stories, um, available, right? Nobody had done that work. And not only that, um, we had several different customers asking for, uh, for this, for this service, um, but nobody had taken the time to really flesh out the, the user journeys. Um, so. I worked with my product manager for a couple of weeks to kind of grind through what um what the API might look like or what the user journeys might look like and then translate that into an API. We started with kind of the basics, so the, the, the basic part of that, that you need for an account is the ability to sign into the account, um. And then the, once you signed in, you might forget your password. So we added in, all right, I can sign in. I need to be able to reset my password. Um, and then the next thing is be able to, uh, create a, an admin or a default persona in the account and, and have the ability to use, use just like the basic structure. So, so that, that resulted in a, a, a, a, a sign-in. Credit operations for an account, um, and then credit operations for a persona. Um, and we decided to, to, uh, just build those things, um, as an initial kind of MVP. Um, I sat down and, and, and wrote a spec. Um, for, for those, for those methods, and, and the SEC was, was an API was a REST API, um, and handed that off to the dev team. Um, the, the first thing that the dev team built was the account cred and then sign in. And while they were building that, we got, um, uh, uh, uh, our first customer, basically, we signed our first customer during that period and all they wanted was the ability to create an account and sign into it. Um, so we, we kinda, we kinda caught a break there. Um, the team was able to, to build the sign-in and to create the, the credit on the account, um, object, and the customer was actually managing, managing their own identity providers, so we didn't have to worry about, um, all those extra identity, um. Uh, details inside of our data model, um, we were able to, to, to deliver something that worked for them, something that, something that their integration partners could begin building a UI around immediately, so that was, that was a big win.

Um, yeah, I think, uh, So, you know, thinking, thinking back to, back to those days, um, what I, what I was doing was talking to solutions architects and, you know, these, these are the guys that represented the customers that we were trying to build this thing for. Um, what I understood was that they were using our existing identity service to, to manage their, um, what we call, uh, entitlements, um, and their, their user ID, um, on, on. Um, One use case from that one customer. And the solutions architect, it seemed, didn't really have a sense, the solutions architects didn't have a real sense of what the customers wanted. Basically, I think what happened is, we had a, we had a, a sales team that was super excited to come up with this great idea, um, or they had heard about some other company that was, that was offering this kind of service, and I think sometimes the, the word just gets out like, hey, we're gonna, we're gonna uh start providing this service. And I, I, I think that's what must have happened. I, I, you know, I wasn't in sales, but You know, but, but what I got back was, hey, we, we are thinking about getting into this, into this, uh, into this market, um, you know, let's, let's come up with something. Let's just, let's just build something and design it on the fly, and, and let's see, let's see where it goes. We know that we have some customers that have expressed interest because of some phone calls that we had with them. And so, You know, that was it. So let's, let's just take it from there. It, it really wasn't, it wasn't a very structured, um, it wasn't a structured deal like you would normally get, right? Where you go out and you sell a product that you already, that you already have, you know, this was a, hey, we might have this thing, um, Customers are interested in it. Let's try to earn their business by building it. We're anticipating their needs.

Um, I mean, from, from a, from a product perspective, definitely. I, I think from a product perspective, the, the right approach would be to You know, talk with customers, ask them what they really want. Write up some user journeys, write up their requirements, um, you know, the product requirements, what, what they're really after, um, before handing, before handing off, uh, kind of a half-baked idea to a program manager, uh, to build a proof of concept or come up with a design for. Um, I, you know, that's, that's how I would normally expect requirements to appear in, on, you know, in, in my inbox. Yeah.