Behind Every Great Product is a Better Story

Jul 24 2023 • 41 mins

In today's episode of Mistaken Identity, Matt interviewsShiv Ramji, President of Customer Identity Cloud at Okta. Okta is an independent identity provider that helps organizations securely connect the right people to the right technologies at the right time. At Okta, Shiv focuses on seamless and secure customer experiences. He is responsible for the Customer Identity Cloud product, data, security and technology strategy, and execution. Today, Shiv describes the holistic customer journey, how to trust your product intuition, and why storytelling matters for building great products.

Key Quotes:

“You need to think through all the pathways that your customers are gonna experience with a product.”

“Think of all of your customer journeys holistically. There are ways to really configure all of these touchpoints, whether it's sign up, sign in, reset flows, adding authentication. It’s so much more than the login box.”

“When you're building products, there's a portion of decisions that will come down to your intuition, your experience, or just your taste. So that's how I think of using data to make decisions. And using data to essentially know whether you're going after the right outcome.”

“Great product managers are really good at aligning the team. And a big portion of your job is to take messy data or insights or information or feedback from customers, from internal teams. And boiling it down to the essence that matters and then aligning the team around that insight.”

“You gotta be a great communicator and a great storyteller. Behind every great product that you know, or that you used, or have experienced, there is great storytelling behind it.”

“Product managers don't necessarily think of storytelling as their job. It’s really critical. You have to be a storyteller for your own internal teams, for your stakeholders, for your partner teams. All the way to customers.”

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