Context
A customer-facing product had no login at all. Customers needed a way to access their account, and the team was scoping a significant build around a new identity provider: passwords, resets, session management, the lot.
Challenge
The proposed build was extensive and would take months. The risk was that the team was solving the general authentication problem rather than the one in front of them.
Approach
I pushed the team back to first principles: what did users need? A secure, frictionless way into their account. Magic links met that need with far less infrastructure. No passwords to store, no identity provider to integrate and operate. I backed the team’s instinct to take the simpler path and helped them make the case to product stakeholders.
Outcome
Magic link authentication shipped in a fraction of the proposed time and gave the product its first customer login. The project became an internal reference for questioning assumed complexity before committing to large technical builds.