Simon Burns is a Product Manager at Earnin. At Earnin, he spends a lot of time on messaging products and thinking about how to roll-out new consumer experiences. To roll-out a successful customer experience, a PM needs to think about what problem they are solving, how they are going to acquire their early users and what platform/modality they will reach users on.
In this post, Simon Burns from Earnin lists a few thoughts on how approach launching new products.
Simon Burns from Ernin discusses how to successfully launch new products using his experience at Earnin as a launching pad.
How to Successfully Launch New Products
- Focus on Your Customer and Solve Something For Them
This sounds straightforward, but it is surprising how often this goes neglected. Focus on a customer, solve a core and hard problem for them and you are ahead of 99% of products that launch. In order to deeply understand your customer, get on the phone with team. Find them in their place of business. Do whatever you need to have a discussion with your end customer.
Once you have them in discussion, don’t push your product idea. Be an active listener, engage and hear them out. If you draw out their problems and pain points instead of being in the driver seat, you’ll learn far more.
- Build, Ship Fast, Learn from Data, Repeat
Don’t spend too much time building, look to launch as early as possible. Why? Well you can only start learning once your product is live! That’s how product development happens.
So, ship the “quickest and dirtiest” version you can, and start gathering information and data. Only then can you really start making progress and making strides against your goals.
So launch early, iterate based on the data you’re capturing and repeat, with rapid launches followed by a process of learning.
- Get Your Hands Dirty
A challenges in launching new products arises in matching service delivery with customer expectations. Why? Well you go live, like when Earnin went live, you face a challenge of selling to customers a product they want and providing that product. This sounds obvious, but you need to have enough staff or product (depending on if you’re offering a product or service) ready to go.
So, how do you solve this apparent imbalance? Get your hands dirty and be the service provider or support staff yourself in the early days! Not only will you be able to fill the imbalance, you’ll also learn a ton of information by being so close to your customers.
Lessons from Earnin
So, what are the lessons from Earnin on starting a new product. First, talk to your customers, be an active listener and really engage. Second, launch early so you can start learning, then iterate rapidly. Third and finally, fix your supply or support imbalance by jumping in and filling those gaps yourself.
About Simon Burns at Earnin
Simon Burns at Earnin enjoying tea and discussing product launch strategy.
Simon Burns is a Product Manager at Earnin. You can find him on his personal website, Simon Burns, Earnin’s product manager on referrals. Before Earnin, Simon was a PM at Opendoor, started a cryptocurrency startup and started his career at Robinhood. He loves French film, reading about business biographies (currently reading High Financier by Niall Ferguson on the life and times of Siegmund Warburg).
Simon Burns from Earnin is on Twitter, posts photos on Instagram, shares new product ideas on ProductHunt.
You can connect with him on LinkedIn. See his ongoing projects on Github and see his other posts on his Medium account.
