Meet the brilliant mind behind Yahoo's Account Key success story
Throughout his colorful career, Chhabra has proven himself time and again to be a most exceptional employee, having a strong impact and leaving a noteworthy imprint on the companies he works with every time he moves on to his next great adventure. In one such assignment with General Electric, it was just eight weeks into his position that he started taking on the responsibility of managing relationships between his own team and three other faculties within the company. His dedication and passion for his work helped him to thrive and excel, making him hungry to kick more professional goals.
Going on to achieve great success in companies like Pfizer and Oracle, Chhabra was on a trajectory going nowhere but up. In 2009, he received his MBA and was quickly hired by IBM as a managing consultant. Leading a 40-employee-strong team, Chhabra shined in his managing consultant role. Managing an annual budget of $3m and maintaining a perfect customer satisfaction rating in the process, Chhabra firmly established himself as a positive force to be reckoned with in his field. Even then, he had not hit his peak, and the best was yet to come for his talented and passionate professionals.
Moving on to Yahoo after two wonderful years with IBM, Chhabra moved into his most exciting role yet – product manager for identity at Yahoo.. Initially hired by the company to work on a part of the search business as a program manager, he soon gravitated towards the profile of a product manager and towards identity management, a complex and challenging field. Initially hired in the team for a specific registration track within the membership team, Chhabra proved himself worthy early on and was greatly rewarded for it. In just three months, he was trusted to handle all forms of registration (to put that into perspective, there are a few hundred thousand users every day). Within six months, he was handling all logins (a few hundred million users a day and billions of transactions a day).
It was then that Chhabra began to work on the project that would – and has – defined his career thus far: successfully conceptualising, managing and launching Yahoo Account Key. Recognising that passwords have long presented problems as vulnerable email login tools, Chhabra’s Account Key innovation essentially works around these problems by removing passwords from user accounts, enabling users to use apps on their mobile phones to allow or deny logins for their accounts. Thanks to his work on his master project, Yahoo became the first company to fully commit to changing authentication to move away from passwords.
An unprecedented advancement (to say the least), this move marked the beginning of a whole new era in user privacy and security – all thanks to the brilliant work of Lovlesh Chhabra. Over 600 articles covered the launch of Account Key. Chhabra also received an individual international acknowledgement for his great success. Since then, Account Key has gone on to advance further and further, becoming stronger and more capable in the process. As for what Chhabra’s next professional project will be, only time will tell. But if his professional trajectory up until this point – and, most specifically, his incredible work on Account Key – is anything to go by, it will be remarkable. Chhabra now works as a Vice president of identity, privacy and mobile for Verizon Media (new home of Yahoo).