Honing the Platform: Our Customers Are the Okta Identity Cloud Feedback Loop

Co-creators, collaborators, colleagues. Here at Okta, these words describe our customers as much as our team members. As you use our platform, products, and services to improve your identity and access management (IAM), you’re helping us uncover new opportunities to solve challenges, meet existing and emerging needs, and perfect what we do.

In other words, we want Okta’s product development to be a process with benefits that work both ways—which is why we’ve built our solution as a platform. In order to empower our customers to solve their own unique use cases, we don’t just offer the Okta Identity Cloud as a singular solution, but provide its underlying technologies as out-of-the-box products, APIs, and SDKs.

This is just one example of how we’ve listened to our enterprise customers to help resolve recurring challenges. At the same time, you continue to give us great ideas as you get creative with Okta. It truly is a win-win.

Customer-centric at every stage of the journey

Customer First is a core part of our vision here at Okta, and we know that focusing on understanding your goals, your environment, and your needs is the best way to ensure you’ll be successful. To drive this mutual success, transparency is a core part of everything we do. Within Okta, that means any employee can find out what the product team’s top priorities are, and our roadmap is reviewed each month. Meanwhile, customers like you are actively informing those priorities and roadmaps as you engage with your Okta team. You let us know how and where you envision Okta, and identity, adding value to your larger business goals. 

At Okta, our customers actively inform what we do

Beyond having conversations with your Customer First team, there are several avenues you can use to share your input. Have you visited our Okta Ideas portal in the Okta Help Center? We implemented this tool in 2019, allowing customers to not only submit and prioritize their own input and feature requests, but actively engage with other submissions. This way, as we develop new product features, we have a comprehensive view of the needs of our customer audience.

We also host Okta User Groups, which encourage attendees to connect with their peers and Okta experts, and share their own best practices and success stories. Through our Customer Advisory Board (CAB) meetings and Executive Briefing Center meetings, we also liaise directly with four different cohorts of customers. With them, we have candid conversations about existing features, new product developments, and future functionalities. Okta will also directly approach customers for in-depth conversations or online surveys, and we conduct comprehensive research projects, to gather granular, quantifiable insights.

Beyond active requests for your input, our product development is also informed by how you use our platform. Usage and adoption data are tacit feedback avenues, giving us a comprehensive outlook into which parts of our platform make the most sense for our customers, as well as areas of opportunity. 

Teaming up with our customers is a win-win 

The success of these strategies speaks for itself. In just the past year, we’ve rolled out a number of new offerings and features directly informed by the perspectives and stories you’ve shared. Here are a few of my favorites.

Okta Identity Engine

The Okta Identity Engine shows firsthand how we’re reimagining our SaaS solutions with platform functionality. You shared stories of the specific IAM challenges you face, as well as the unique access experiences you wanted to provide your users. This inspired us to turn our products into flexible, extensible building blocks—allowing you to customize these features. Because you  helped us understand how else the Okta Identity Cloud could meet your individual needs, we were able to take meaningful action.

Devices Platform Service

Our Devices Platform Service is another new offering inspired by customer feedback. Through conversations with our customers, we learned how they tend to work with multiple security vendors. This is often because a distributed approach helps ensure continuity of data protection—even if one of the providers is compromised. Once we understood that this was a common challenge, we designed agnostic integrations across many endpoint solutions. This not only allows your security vendors to incorporate Okta functionality into their solutions, but provides you with visibility into the thousands of devices accessing your systems. We could not have crafted it without your input.

I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again: customer input drives what we do here at Okta. If you have feedback on any of our products or services, we want to hear about it. Talk to your Customer First team, or visit the Okta Ideas portal today.