Before blasting to the stratospheric heights of a new product launch, companies need to do the challenging work of developing the proverbial spacecraft, perfecting the theoretical and practical work of achieving liftoff, and cultivating the right team to ensure success on ground and in flight.
But even in the best weather conditions, it isn’t always smooth soaring. Optimistic estimates place the number of new products that fail around 40 percent, according to a study published by the Journal of Product Innovation and Management, while pessimists, authors George Castellion and Stephen K. Markham note, have traditionally placed the number of failures upwards of 90 percent.
Almost by definition a product launch is risky, and even after the most judicious development process, many new products fail. The launch of a new product is, it follows, a great opportunity for introspection, to address pain points, shore up teams and eventually better meet customers’ needs. During a product launch, the right questions can touch on the core value propositions associated with a company’s offerings.
One such question is: “Can we effectively communicate the value of this product in relationship to our preexisting products?”
That’s a challenge that Ribbon’s Staff Product Manager Kyle Clayton and his team encountered when launching RibbonCash+, a premium addition to the company’s core product for home buyers. The solution, the company realized, was an investment in marketing, education and personnel.
“To overcome this challenge, Ribbon has staffed up in several areas this year, including building out internal and client-facing education teams and expanding our focus on product marketing,” said Clayton.
Built In NYC spoke to five companies that recently embarked on the project of launching a new product. Read on for more on these products, the companies behind them, and the obstacles they overcame on the way to liftoff.
Tell us about a recent product your team launched. When did it launch? What are the implications for your customers and business?
The Atom Finance team recently launched new Advanced Charting capabilities, allowing individual investors and teams to perform comprehensive research on the markets. The new features include technical analysis, event overlays, annotation, sharing and more. Scrolling and zooming is also now easier than ever. Notably, Atom’s charts include real-time market data out of the box.
In addition to our direct-to-consumer platform, the Advanced Charting product is available to Atom’s business-to-business clients. This allows our clients to differentiate themselves by providing their end-users with sophisticated research tools, which are otherwise reserved for professionals.
The new features include technical analysis, event overlays, annotation, sharing and more.”
What was the biggest challenge your team faced while developing this new product, and how did you overcome it?
A significant challenge in launching the Advanced Charting product was visualizing how multiple disparate data sets would come together for in-depth but easy-to-use charting capabilities. The product brings together nearly 10 data sets for users to analyze together, from events to real-time pricing and more.
To overcome the challenge, we spoke to our end-users, read through extensive product feedback, and of course worked with our highly-skilled product designers to create a unique experience for our users and B2B partners.
Atom Finance is a fintech startup aimed at empowering investors to make informed decisions through software and data.
Tell us about a recent product your team launched. When did it launch? What are the implications for your customers and business?
Our team recently launched Investment Opportunities, a page that serves as the primary storefront for available investments on iCapital.
There were several drivers that led our team to focus on this initiative. iCapital is expanding the breadth of investment structures and strategies available on the platform. Users needed a better way to screen available investments, and iCapital’s enterprise clients often differ in how they categorize and present available investments.
The roll out of this feature enables iCapital’s platform expansion and provides valuable data about our users’ investment interests. This information helps inform both our pipeline of investment opportunities as well as future enhancements. We can deliver an experience for our users that balances discovery with the ability to quickly filter down to relevant investment opportunities. We also introduced shortcuts allowing repeat investors to quickly access specific investment-related actions.
The roll out of this feature provides valuable data about our users’ investment interests.”
What was the biggest challenge your team faced while developing this new product, and how did you overcome it?
While we manage an iCapital-branded investment platform, we also deploy white-labeled versions of our platform for enterprise clients. These clients often use iCapital’s technology to improve and grow their existing alternative investment businesses.
Our biggest challenge was balancing the needs of these clients without compromising data structure and operational scalability. To solve for this, we introduced page configurations and attribute overrides.
iCapital’s white label implementations range from platforms with hundreds of investment opportunities to those with only a few available choices. Page configurations give iCapital team members the ability to tailor a page to a particular client’s business by enabling or disabling key capabilities of the Investment Opportunities page.
Many of our larger clients will onboard existing investments and users as part of their implementations. Our attribute override capabilities help provide continuity for these users by allowing the changes to key investment data within the context of a white label without changing or duplicating our master data set.
iCapital is a financial technology company focused on the alternative investment marketplace. The company offers tech-based solutions for advisors, their high-net-worth client base, asset managers and banks.
Tell us about a recent product your team launched. When did it launch? What are the implications for your customers and business?
Ribbon’s core product for home buyers, RibbonCash, has enabled thousands of families to make all-cash offers on homes in 2021. We’ve continued to see strong demand for our program, underwriting $2.5 billion in buying power for RibbonCash customers in the first quarter of this year.
With an ongoing shortage of homes for sale, as well as the rapid appreciation of home prices, home buyers have demanded options to make all-cash offers at even more competitive prices. This March we launched a premium product, RibbonCash+, in three states and have now rolled this out to the rest of our network with positive reception. RibbonCash+ allows buyers to make cash offers on homes at a higher level than we have supported with RibbonCash in the past, in exchange for a fee that scales up with their offer amount.
We expect these investments will enable the Ribbon community to get as many families as possible into their dream homes this year.”
What was the biggest challenge your team faced while developing this new product, and how did you overcome it?
Real estate transactions are already complex for homebuyers. A buyer needs to learn about mortgages, inspections, closing and more to inform what will likely be the biggest financial decision they ever make. Products like all-cash offers are also new to everyday consumers, as well as to many of Ribbon’s partners.
A big challenge with the launch was communicating the benefits and costs of RibbonCash+ and how it complements our existing RibbonCash program. That means thinking through the marketing and educational materials for home buyers and sellers, real estate agents, loan officers, brokers and members of several operational teams within Ribbon itself. To overcome this challenge, Ribbon has staffed up in several areas this year, including building out internal and client-facing education teams and expanding our focus on product marketing.
We are also building explainers, calculators and other supporting tools directly into our application in order to support our clients in the moment when they are planning their offer. We expect these investments will enable the Ribbon community to get as many families as possible into their dream homes this year.
Ribbon’s real estate technology platform offers cash-backed solutions that enable agents, brokerages, lenders, buyers and sellers through a variety of financial products and digital workflow software.
Tell us about a recent product your team launched. When did it launch? What are the implications for your customers and business?
Launchpad is a self-serve experience that allows potential customers to explore how creating a white-label insurance program with Boost actually works. We heard from new customers that there was a lot involved in their decision-making process to work with Boost, so we distilled it into a couple steps in an easy to use portal. We include different types of insurance available, coverage options, their interplay in configuration and how they affect pricing for end customers.
When a prospect is ready, they can even begin setting up the insurance program they want to offer customers right from Launchpad. Business users are not the only customers served by the new application; after a customer configures a new insurance program Boost creates a suite of personalized engineering tools to facilitate an integration. The new Partner will receive a custom sandbox environment along with API documentation and a set of tools for the API platform Postman that allows them to start working Postman collection allowing them to start working with the API immediately. This new product brings the power of Boost’s API into an easy-to-use online portal. It allows potential customers to move at their own pace facilitating everything from discovery through to intent and purchase.
The effort we put in ensures we have a long-term solution that won’t limit us as new products come online and old ones change.”
What was the biggest challenge your team faced while developing this new product, and how did you overcome it?
Before releasing Launchpad, Boost had a manual process for configuring new partners on our platform. With Launchpad, we intended to offer self-configuration complete with sandbox access. We needed to automate several manual processes into a single flow. The issue became how do we generalize the interface for multiple products without having to hardcode each one of them for the front end. Pet, renters and cyber all look very different from an insurance perspective; each has its own coverages, limits and deductibles among other things.
In order to make the new experience flexible we needed a way to pull all that data and display it. After working through the problem in our architecture committee we came up with a way to dynamically request the parameters. We built out an abstraction layer that returned the required parameters per line of business so that we could build out our new flexible front end. This was neither a quick build nor a simple one, but the effort we put in ensures we have a long-term solution that won’t limit us as new products come online and old ones change.
Boost provides insurance infrastructure-as-a-service that packages compliance, operational, capital and technological components of an insurance program into a turnkey white-label insurance solution.
Tell us about a recent product your team launched. When did it launch? What are the implications for your customers and business?
We launched renters insurance for one of our large enterprise clients. This provides our landlords and renters with one-stop shopping for all of their rent coverage, deposit and renters insurance needs. It also opens up an important new revenue stream for TheGuarantors.
We launched renters insurance for one of our large enterprise clients.’’
What was the biggest challenge your team faced while developing this new product, and how did you overcome it?
We had to integrate with our partner MSI. This required various iterations as we learned about some of the more detailed requirements and constraints involved. I’m very proud of the team for finding a solution that has now been tested and verified by MSI.
TheGuarantors is a fintech company that provides financial and insurance solutions to aid renters and landlords.
