Mailerite - SSO
MailerLite is a SaaS platform used by businesses to create, manage, and grow email marketing campaigns. As the product expanded across multiple tools and surfaces, authentication and identity became foundational infrastructure rather than a background concern.
Single Sign-On (SSO) was introduced to simplify access across products and reduce friction during account creation and login. However, as usage scaled, cracks in the experience became increasingly visible.
SSO failures didn’t just block access, they eroded trust, increased support load, and caused users to abandon onboarding entirely.
From a user perspective, SSO issues showed up as:
Unclear login vs sign-up paths across MailerGroup apps
Too many steps just to get an account
No clear path to switch between MailerGroup apps
From the business side, the impact was significant:
A growing volume of SSO-related support tickets
Drop-offs during account creation
Increased manual intervention from support and engineering teams
This was not a visual polish issue. It was a system reliability and communication problem at the most sensitive moment of the user journey.
Before proposing solutions, we aligned on the constraints shaping the work:
Security & compliance: Authentication flows could not compromise security standards
Existing technical debt: Full architectural rewrites were not feasible in the short term
Time pressure: Support ticket volume made this a near-term priority
Limited time and cross-team dependencies
A full architectural rewrite wasn’t feasible. We needed meaningful impact without destabilizing auth infrastructure.
I partnered with Product, Engineering, and Support to diagnose failure modes rather than jumping into visuals.
Key findings:
SSO was broken from the architecture and couldn’t support easier solutions assumed
Users often didn’t know what action to take next
Similar failures presented differently depending on entry point
We considered three directions:
Full SSO abstraction rewrite → too risky and slow
Improve showcasing of social login options, explore faster app switching and onboarding → chosen
Entry-point UI polish only → low impact
The focus shifted from “making SSO nicer” to making authentication and switching easier with what is working.
The design strategy centered on:
Seamless switching across MailerGroup Apps to unlock cross-selling opportunities
Reduce number of clicks to onboard users who already have an account in any MailerGroup product.
Make social sign-up and login options more visible and effortless
This involved a swift investigation and running a test to determine the benefits of smooth app switching.
Post-launch, we observed:
A clear reduction in SSO-related support tickets
Improved onboarding speed by ~40% after reducing steps from 4 → 2.
Delivered an app-switching model that was 2.5× easier to discover, boosting MailerGroup App navigation
This project reinforced that:
Authentication and SSO is a trust surface, not a background feature
System thinking is essential before interface design
Creating value for users should also be balanced with technical constraint
Up next
