Innovation ignited: How product leaders fuel innovation with digital Identity

Okta

December 11, 2024

As champions of product innovation and customer experience, chief product officers, directors, and strategists play a strategic role in delivering products that make it easy for customers to solve their everyday challenges. However, competition in the SaaS industry is fierce. Unique features serve as competitive differentiators, but customers and partners always want more. To drive growth, product leaders need to ensure all aspects of user experience are intuitive, seamless, and flexible — including authentication and authorization.

The steps users take to log in to systems set the tone for all interactions that follow. By simplifying these initial B2B and B2C experiences, and by providing flexible, modern authentication capabilities including single sign-on (SSO) and passwordless experiences, product leaders can leverage security as a competitive differentiator. That’s because intuitive, self-service onboarding experiences can help SaaS companies drive conversions by shortening the time between decision and action. Companies can also spur growth by providing enterprise customers with solutions that are easy to integrate and manage as part of their software ecosystem.

While fast and seamless onboarding, logins, and B2B customization experiences can drive growth, they must be balanced with modern data protections. Achieving these often-conflicting priorities is easier — and faster — with a unified digital Identity strategy.

How organizations inadvertently hinder time to market

Using cumbersome or custom auth strategies puts extra pressure on product teams. Their primary role is to launch and evolve the core SaaS product they're responsible for, so when they must manually develop or manage auth, they have less bandwidth to innovate. Building customer-facing capabilities can take longer than planned, driving up costs. And projects that can help employees pinpoint opportunities for improved experiences and marketing efforts, like providing teams with insights into onboarding and login processes, can also take a back seat.

Increase adoption and keep the focus on innovation

By adopting an authentication and authorization solution that equips developers, IT teams, and B2B customers with the out-of-the-box features they're looking for, product leaders can spearhead greater efficiency, improve user experiences, and accelerate the delivery of new features and products. This strategy yields measurable outcomes. A 2023 Okta study reveals that 88% of organizations using a third-party SaaS platform for authentication reduced time to market.

How Snyk simplified customer onboarding and doubled conversions

Four years after SaaS provider Snyk started selling their vulnerability detection software for code and licenses, the organization had more than 400,000 users, was valued at over $2 billion, and was still experiencing rapid growth. To keep up with demand and advance their B2B and B2C product roadmaps, Snyk needed a unified auth solution that didn't slow development like their custom-built product did.

By adopting a unified digital Identity solution that includes integrated auth capabilities, Snyk accelerated onboarding so it takes just seconds. B2B corporate customers now access Snyk via SSO or Azure Active Directory, and they can use their own role-based access settings to govern which employees access Snyk. B2C customers access Snyk using their social logins including GitHub, Bitbucket, and Google.

Simplifying access for users while delivering enterprise-grade protections has improved conversion rates by 100%. Now that developers no longer maintain and evolve a custom auth solution or manage tasks like manual password resets, they have more time to focus on delivering innovative features. Ensuring compliance also takes less effort because the company's unified solution offers the ability to configure the collection of personal data to comply with regulations including GDPR and the California Consumer Privacy Act.

How Kiva brings features and products to market faster

Like many organizations, nonprofit Kiva launched their global lending platform with a home-built Identity and authentication system. Although it initially met Kiva's requirements, the system's limitations became apparent as the company grew. Kiva's developers were unable to easily scale out the system to meet evolving worker requirements and ensure compliance with rapidly evolving industry regulations.

By adopting a digital Identity solution from Okta that includes authentication and authorization capabilities, Kiva was able to improve employee and partner experience by offering anywhere app access and frictionless logins including SSO facilitated by pre-built integrations. Additionally, the company increased security, reduced help-desk tickets, and empowered their developers to spend their time creating offerings that help customers rather than managing Identity and authentication.

In time, Kiva expanded their Okta solution to provide auth services for their customers as well. As a result, Kiva now brings new products to market up to three months faster. Developers spend less time managing customers’ identities, authentication, and authorization, especially since they were able to eliminate 22,000 lines of custom code that previously enabled social media integrations. Kiva has also been able to use SSO as a value-added service that they can quickly scale to meet demand. For example, when Kiva had a prospective customer require SSO with Apple Account, developers were able to add that capability in just minutes with Okta.

Ignite innovation at your organization

With Okta, you can maximize the time your teams have for creating differentiating solutions to improve experience, security, and innovation. Okta equips organizations with an enterprise-grade Identity management platform that reduces complexity and simplifies the steps for turning ideas into impactful solutions. As a result, your teams can simplify development workflows and build solutions that are flexible enough to integrate with other technologies and support new use cases. Built-in capabilities include multi-tenancy, automated provisioning and deprovisioning, no-code and low-code authentication customizations, enterprise federation with Identity stores, and self-service SSO.

Start Getting to Market Faster: Learn More about Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM)