The launch of a new product is an exciting time for any company, and not just because product launches are often the most noteworthy and anticipated projects companies do. There’s a lot that goes into launching something new: research and development, testing, cross-functional meetings and sign-offs, marketing plans and more all happen behind the scenes just to bring that product to be ready for launch.
We spoke with three companies that recently launched new products to learn more about the challenges and innovation behind them. For some, their products are the first of their kind. For others, they solve a long bemoaned issue in their industry. All three are driving innovation with their product launch and found great fulfillment in their work.
For instance, iCapital conducted a series of interviews to understand what problems their clients were facing and how they might solve them. As a result, the design team turned that feedback into powerful design changes which the company says can be seen throughout the tool they’ve created, iCapital Architect.
At ActionIQ, challenges faced were “in the strategic fog of war and the alignment of vision” when developing its new product, Hybrid Compute. The team had to balance flexibility and power during development.
For Movable Ink, the biggest challenge to its new AI Suite product wasn’t in development, but in market adoption. The company had to find ways of convincing its marketing customers to change the way they work, showing them how AI performs against their old way of marketing. Once marketers saw the data, Moveable Ink says the switch was easy for their users to make.
Read on to learn more about these companies and the road they took to create and launch their newest products.
iCapital’s intuitive, scalable digital solutions help to innovate, educate and navigate the alternative investment marketplace.
Tell us about a recent product your team launched.
iCapital Architect, launched July 12 to select users, is a first-of-its-kind portfolio construction tool that empowers wealth advisors to build portfolios that help meet their clients’ needs by utilizing alternative investments and structured investments as well as traditional assets. Architect allows users to visualize key risk drivers, compare scenarios, simulate historical performance and design outcome-oriented, personalized client portfolios.
Before Architect, analysis of portfolios that included alternatives and structured investments was incredibly cumbersome, leaving advisors to analyze portfolios by hand or to use tools that did not allow them to analyze complex asset classes. Architect allows advisors to spend less time modeling and more time focusing on clients.
What was the biggest challenge your team faced while developing this new product, and how did you overcome it?
Architect’s goal from the beginning was to deliver institutional-level analytics with an intuitive user experience. Addressing this challenge requires a delicate balance, ensuring that the analytics remain robust without compromising usability.
Addressing this challenge requires a delicate balance, ensuring that the analytics remain robust without compromising usability.”
Our goal is to empower advisors, including those unfamiliar with alternatives or structured investments, to readily comprehend and assess the impacts of their portfolio allocation decisions. To make sure we are achieving this goal, our team conducted a long series of user interviews engaging advisors across a spectrum of familiarity with these assets. The goal of these interviews was to discern ways to make analytics that are easily understood by novices, yet helpful to the expert.
Our UX team is amazing at translating feedback into smart design and you can see their fingerprints throughout the tool. The team is constantly refining the designs and will be collecting feedback from users in the next few months to make the tool even better.
What have you enjoyed most about working on this product, and why?
Architect is an incredibly rewarding project to work on as it directly solves an advisor problem. We have heard time and time again from advisors that they are looking for functionality that does what Architect does, and, up until now, we have not been able to provide them with an answer. Knowing that you are working towards closing a gap in the industry is incredibly fulfilling. We truly think this can help advisors to better understand all of the tools that they have at their disposal and the benefits and trade-offs of each. Helping advisors unlock this knowledge not only helps them but ultimately helps their clients, and that makes it all worth it.
Headquartered in NYC, Movable Ink and its more than 650 team members serve clients around the world with their marketing software, activating data into personalized content.
Tell us about a recent product your team launched.
On June 15, 2023 Movable Ink launched our AI Suite. Our suite of AI models help marketers better understand customers, personalize content and engage with the right message at the right time. Customers using the AI Suite are seeing 19 percent increase in conversions (sales) and a 23 percent increase in revenue. With Movable Ink AI, every brand will have a data-driven copilot focused on generating the most personalized content and supporting their business goals.
What was the biggest challenge your team faced while developing this new product, and how did you overcome it?
When marketers use the Movable Ink AI Suite, it changes the way they think about campaigns and content. Convincing a marketer to change the way they work requires that the new way performs much better. We overcame this challenge by building automatic holdout groups and reports in the user interface that show the marketer how the AI performs against their old way of marketing. Once they see the data, they buy into the new workflow and way of thinking.
Convincing a marketer to change the way they work requires that the new way performs much better.”
What have you enjoyed most about working on this product, and why?
Solving hard problems with AI requires collaboration from engineers, data scientists, product managers and UX designers. I’ve personally enjoyed watching the entire team rally around solving big challenges. With new technology like ChatGPT and Computer Vision, we’ve solved problems that would have been impossible or extremely time-consuming. Seeing and hearing how much of an impact we’ve had on our customers’ business outcomes is extremely rewarding.
ActionIQ’s CX Hub platform enables business teams to take action on customer data.
Tell us about a recent product your team launched.
Modern marketing technology stacks can be complex due to the multiple tools used to create and manage copies of data at various stages. This poses both data governance and operational challenges. AIQ’s Hybrid Compute offers a solution by combining the power of AIQ’s powerful CDP capabilities with the flexibility of leveraging existing cloud data warehouses. This allows customers to have complete control and flexibility over where their customer data is stored and queried.
Hybrid Compute is essentially a data control plane that is agnostic to the underlying data plane. This means that it can connect to multiple data warehouses and enable users to execute marketing campaigns and personalization initiatives. Hybrid Compute’s zero-copy architecture minimizes the need for local storage of data copies. This not only simplifies data governance and operations but also unlocks velocity, allowing customers to operationalize their data with more speed and agility.
By leveraging their existing IT investments, customers can strategically deploy Hybrid Compute to manage data governance and operational costs, which enables customer teams to focus on delivering value to their customers.
What was the biggest challenge your team faced while developing this new product, and how did you overcome it?
Hybrid Compute was driven by a broader market trend towards composability which created an opportunity at the intersection of a major industry trend and changing customer preferences. The biggest challenge and opportunity was in the strategic fog of war — and the alignment of vision we needed to execute well on it.
A guiding principle for our execution was to ensure that we don’t take shortcuts: That the product was both flexible and powerful enough to meet the needs of our core buyers and users, enterprise business with complex requirements for data, governance and agility. This is both a design and technical challenge. We had to ensure that we build a solution that works seamlessly across multiple data warehouses, including InfiniteCompute, AIQ’s storage and compute layer. We also had to do this in a way that optimizes query cost and performance across multiple data warehouses and technologies.
A guiding principle for our execution was to ensure that we don’t take shortcuts.”
Working on long-term strategic initiatives is always a challenge, but ultimately a rewarding experience. With the right support from AIQ leadership, it is great to see a vision come to life and have a meaningful impact for both our customers and the AIQ business.
What have you enjoyed most about working on this product, and why?
AIQ’s roots are in deep technical and product expertise, applied to meaningful customer problems. We're passionate about innovation and about helping businesses succeed, and this product represents the perfect intersection of these two values.
Hybrid Compute is a cutting-edge solution that provides IT teams with the flexibility they need to optimize their data operations and increase productivity. With its revolutionary zero-copy architecture, warehouse-agnostic approach and no-code UI, Hybrid Compute is a powerful tool that can help organizations of all sizes improve their data operations and drive business growth.
