Designing a Company-Wide Identity, Roles and Consent Platform for Flipkart Teams

You are a product manager at Flipkart. Many teams across the company need to manage users, and you are asked to design a user management system (UMS) that all of them can use. Leave scalability aside for this question: assume the infrastructure can handle the load, and concentrate on what the system does, whom it serves and how you would design it. ```hint Find the platform's customers Ask who this system is for: the people whose accounts it holds, the internal teams that build on it, or both. List what each group would need before you choose features. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Which users does the system manage: shoppers, sellers and their staff, delivery partners, employees using internal tools, or several of these? - Do teams keep their own user records today, so that adoption and migration are part of the job? - Should the system own sign-up and sign-in, or only profiles, roles and permissions, with authentication handled elsewhere? - Which privacy and consent rules must it enforce when one team wants user data that another team collected? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - A clear scope: which user types the system manages and which capabilities it owns versus leaves to individual teams - The needs of each customer group: end users, the internal teams integrating with it, and support and compliance staff - Core capabilities backed by a data model and interfaces: identity, profiles, organizations, roles and permissions, consent and audit - A prioritized path for teams to adopt the system, including migration of existing accounts - Success metrics and risks such as account takeover, privacy, sign-in as a shared point of failure, and ownership of shared data ### Follow-up Questions - Two teams want different fields on the same user profile and disagree about who owns the phone number. How do you govern the shared data? - How would you move a team with a large existing user base onto the system without forcing everyone to sign in again? - The system's direct customers are other teams. How do you know whether it is succeeding?