Admin Console Template for Product Planning

Start with role-based access control (RBAC) with 4-5 predefined roles. This covers 90% of customer needs. Add custom roles only when enterprise customers specifically request it and are willing to pay for the complexity. Overly granular permissions create confusion for admins and maintenance burden for engineering. The [glossary entry on RBAC](/glossary/aarrr-pirate-metrics) covers the tradeoffs between RBAC and attribute-based models.

For most SaaS products under 1,000 customers, build it as a section within the main application. A separate application adds deployment complexity, authentication challenges, and forces context-switching for admins who also use the product. Separate admin applications make sense at scale (10,000+ customers) or when internal operations teams need a purpose-built tooling surface.

Basic user management (invite, remove, view), organization profile settings, and a simple activity feed. Reserve SSO, custom roles, audit log access, API management, and advanced security policies for paid plans. Admin features are strong enterprise upgrade drivers.

Build admin features incrementally in this order: user invite/remove (week 1), role assignment (week 2), org settings (week 3), audit log (week 4). Each step eliminates a category of support tickets. Track ticket reduction per feature to justify continued investment. ---