What Product Managers Need to Know About Digital Identity with Paul McGuire

Welcome to the Product Coach Podcast series for Product Leaders with me, Ross Webb.

Identify online is something that us as Product Leaders and Product Managers need to know about.

In this podcast, I’m talking to Paul McGuire, the founder of tru.ID. 

It's interesting that we don't even know how many people we lose after failed sign-ups.

They stop in the process, but that's half of the picture and then afterward they post on social and they tried to use the app but the experience was so bad they aren't going to use it again. Big knock-on effect.

So we're going to be talking to a real thought leader in the field of Authentication especially now in the world of Mobile, Identity and mobile identity is the issue.

Why now? By the end of 2020, 46% of the global population owned a smartphone, that's 3.3bn according to Statista. This is projected to grow by a further 11% this year, according to Gartner. Half of the world is carrying a security device on them without realising it.

So what's the problem? Product managers may not realise that the lift and shift approach from desktop to mobile goes way beyond making websites responsive, or smaller, or building mobile apps that mimic the way we used to build websites. By doing so, we've created a lot of UX clutter. Paul thinks about the 3 steps a user has to make to a request for an SMS to validate their phone number, that's 3 screens right there. A magic link takes you out of your app, and into the email client, leading to interrupted experiences. Paul speaks to app developers and they lose between 20-30% of users at onboarding.

The other opportunity is that there's a very small, but very powerful technology that sits in our pocket - and that's the SIM card.

It's small but it packs a punch in terms of security and identity data - it's connected to perhaps a boring but very solid, and important industry - the telcos. 

This is a fascinating episode.

I truly hope you enjoy and learn a lot from it.

Links in the Podcast:

• tru.ID