😣 Help: No one uses this cool thing 😎 we built (Part II of II)
What happens when ego turns into hubris
Let’s dive straight into the why. 🤿
Our solution solved a real user pain point. It was ahead of its time and super cool. We even got the +1 from a cornerstone regulator in the APAC region.
The key miss that led to our failure was the lack of buyer/ user research and testing. We fell in love with a shiny cool feature 💍, instead of the user problem. Our egos got the better of us. We thought we knew better.
You could argue that the world was just not ready for it; that we were such frontiers we were misunderstood… 🙄 Excuses.
Our onboarding flow was web-first, as we served a business user persona whose job was 99% of the time performed on-site using a company computer, behind badged, locked doors 🔒; at a time when most non-exchange trades happened via voice on recorded, fixed company phone lines ☎️. Large sums of money was at stake, mistakes were consequential and the threat of compliance & data leaks were real. It was no wonder that our clients expected bullet proof security.
To recap, our facial recognition authentication required 1) the user’s mobile phone, and 2) their selfie. We omitted crucial research on both fronts.
Using personal mobile devices for work 📱
Let’s time travel back to 2014. How did companies feel about employees using personal devices for work? Actually, barely anyone was allowed to ⛔. Most companies issued BlackBerry devices and prohibited the use of personal smartphones, especially in regulated industries. Blackberry reached its peak in Sep 2011 📈, with 85M subscribers worldwide. We all know what happened later 📉🪦, after the iPhone made its debut in 2007. Later on, circa 2016, iPhones were purchased en masse by JPMorgan to hand out to employees for work, so everything could be sanctioned and controlled. Expensive & clunky, of course; yet it was still the preferred ‘remote work’ set up over BYO-(personal) Device for the sake of security.
☠️ PM sin #1: We did not understand our buyers (clients)’ sentiment towards employees using personal mobile devices for work. We assumed our solution was too good to say no to.
Looking back, we really should have known. We had an accompanying mobile trading app which we struggled to gain adoption due to this exact reason. Our web & mobile product teams were siloed, encouraged to compete against each other 🤼♂️ and no one thought to exchange notes to connect the dots.
The selfie 🤳
It’s important to note that while novel to the general public, biometric authentication wasn’t entirely ground-breaking to our target user base back then. Bloomberg, the OG Fintech, added fingerprint scanners to the Bloomberg keyboards as early as 2004 and released a credit card size ‘B-Unit’ to biometrically authenticate users the following year. 😲Talk about being ahead of the curve! For this reason, I am not convinced that biometric authentication was so foreign to our users that it caused fear and rejection.
As with your Face ID, you enrol by first registering your face. It was the same for us. Our onboarding flow required users to take a selfie video using their mobile phone, which we used to authenticate against their subsequent login. Our UX, while imperfect, wasn’t too different from today’s common practice. What was the 👿 culprit then?!
Think for a second about how you take a selfie. You hold and face your phone at arm’s length 🤳. What might that look like in an office? From a distance, it might look like you’re taking a photo of your monitor screen 💻 instead of your face. How would your employer feel about that, when they’re already so concerned about data leakage? Not good, right? 😨
We received the above feedback after our disappointing launch, but it was already too late.
☠️ PM sin #2: We did not field test or pilot our solution in our users’ environment & set up. We worked on it in a secret lab, went for a big bang (ahem, waterfall) launch so we could get that next promotion 🤑. We did not get feedback early or at all!
⏩ Fast forward 9 years, these days I lead product teams tackling very different problems. One thing I always expect of my teams, regardless of the domain/ problem space they’re in, is to fall in love 😻 with the problem, not the feature.
⚓ Anchoring on the problem allows you to focus on who you’re solving for, when they run into it, how impactful the problem is, what solving it well might look like, how you’d measure your solution etc. It keeps your mind open 🧠 for the best solution and prompts you to challenge your own assumptions. Sometimes this means you make incremental tweaks to your existing solution. Other times you might have to wipe the slate clean and start all over. It’s easy to forget the unglamorous problem, when your mind & ego are fixated on the shiny object 💎. But if you don’t walk in your customer’s shoes 👟, who would?
> To recap, our facial recognition authentication required 1) the user’s mobile phone, and 2) their selfie. We omitted crucial research on both fronts.
So point #1 failed because the work phone is not considered to be "something they have", a "possession", correct?
Thank you for sharing, insightful story! (and very painful at the time, I imagine!)