[majormajor]

At the last big subscription company I was at, it wasn't a product owner seniority thing, it was a organizational problem.

Signup is a big thing with lots of stakeholders and interest. User acquisition is an easy metric to track for business health. Everyone wants to push not-logged-in users to sign up.

Ownership of logging in was much less clear. It's not a full time job for a person or team in the same way customer acquisition is. So you put some buttons/links on the page, but then there's no single owner of them to get pissed off when other teams start moving their shit around.

(The other aspect here is that the website was a declining platform compared to the apps, where a not-logged-in user is much more captive and there's a more obvious single "login or signup" landing page point. On the web most media sites, at least, try to provide SOME sort of preview/partially functional experience version of the logged-in view, which wasn't designed with a prominent "SIGN IN" button in mind.)

[kevincox]

This is what is screams to me. When I have a hard time finding the sign-in link it says "We don't care about our existing users, we only care about getting new ones." It is a big red flag for me these days.