Want to Know If Your Product Team Is Close Enough to Its Users? Try Resetting Your Password.

Slack’s “Magic Link,” a rare well-designed password reset experience.

When I started working in consumer tech, I was excited to talk with users about new feature ideas and product enhancements. But many of these conversations wound up boiling down to a much more mundane concern: “I’m having some trouble logging in.”

As a product manager tasked with thinking through a product’s strategic vision, “Can you help me reset my password?” is not the most exciting question you could hope to hear. But it may be a critical signal that your product team has become too far-removed from the day-to-day needs and concerns of its users.

It’s easy to see why password resets might not be top-of-mind for product teams. For starters, password resets are not often associated with the “power users” for whom far too many products are implicitly designed. Beyond that, it is quite unlikely that a member of your product team would wind up having to reset their own password, given that they are (hopefully) pretty familiar with their own login credentials. In other words, password reset problems are unlikely to be encountered within the day-to-day practice of “dogfooding” (using your own product), and are easy enough to blame on user error.

From a user’s standpoint, though, the ease or difficulty of resetting a password can be the deciding factor between completing a conversion and abandoning a product altogether. To better understand the scope of this issue in my own life, I looked back through my inbox and found ten password reset emails from the last three months alone. Seven of them resulted in a successful password reset and login. Three of them proved to be so convoluted and/or bug-ridden that I just gave up. In one of those three cases, a password reset process for an airline was so frustrating that I wound up booking my ticket on another airline.

Here are some steps you can take to avoid losing users and revenue to a crummy or broken password reset flow:

1. Reset Your Password
   … go ahead, just try it. Is it easy? Is it difficult? Is it ridiculous? Does it even work? This will only take you a couple of minutes, and you might learn a lot.
2. Go to the Data
   How many of your users are initiating a password reset on a given day? How many are succeeding, and how many are giving up? How do these numbers align with your overall rate of growth and/or churn? Knowing these numbers will help you prioritize potential changes and improvements.
3. Create a Culture that Respects All Users, Even the Less “Advanced” Ones
   I am not particularly proud of the fact that, more than once in my career, I have said something to the effect of, “LOL who can’t even figure out how to reset their password!” Creating a culture of true user-centricity means respecting all of your users, and not dismissing or writing off those whose are less “advanced” than the professional engineers, designers, and product managers on your team.
4. Talk to Your Users!
   Resetting a password is just one of many things that may be more important to your users than it is to your team. The best way to stay out ahead of these disconnects is to talk to your users early, often, and openly.