Launching a product in a pandemic?

Covid-19 has created unprecedented economic turbulence, putting enormous pressure on businesses of all sizes and across virtually all industries. For many companies, including those in the growing financial technology (Fintech) sector, this difficult business climate has thrown a wrench in plans for developing and rolling out new products.

As a Fintech start-up, we’ve faced this challenge first-hand, and through perseverance and creativity, we’ve learned valuable lessons that made our product stronger. Three key steps, built around customer-focus, bold prioritizing, and creativity, can enable you to meet the moment and successfully launch a product during a pandemic.

Reach out to customers

It’s always important to listen to customers, but it becomes mission-critical during a pandemic. Rapid changes in the business environment mean that pre-Covid-19 assumptions may be invalid or fail to reflect current customer priorities.

There’s no substitute for real conversations with customers that provide up-to-date feedback on your product plan. While your vision is important, the product will only be a success if you talk to your customers, take their needs into account and honestly assess whether what you’re building relieves their pain points.

In this process, it’s important to go beyond just your biggest clients. To refine our product, we interviewed dozens of business owners, including a filmmaker, gym owner, real estate developer, and elder-care provider. Reaching out to a wide range of customers provides diverse perspectives, which are critical to understanding the scope of customer needs in light of the pandemic’s uneven impact across business sectors and geographic areas.

Don’t be afraid to narrow your priorities

It’s normal to start with a laundry list of what seem like essential components of your product. In the face of a pandemic, what’s really essential, though, is identifying one or two true top priorities and then having the courage to cast everything else aside.

For our product, Tillful, a free solution for optimizing small-business financial management, we started with 20 features on the road map. Trying to develop all of them in time for our launch date could have bogged down and distracted our team. Instead, we listened to our users, focused on what mattered most to them, and shelved other ideas that were interesting but not essential.

In the midst of a pandemic and economic crisis, customers turn their attention to their most pressing needs. In the same way, launching a product to meet those needs requires staying laser-focused so that your team can most effectively deploy its skills and expertise while working toward a clear goal.

Take lemons and make lemonade

It may sound cliché, but the fact is launching a product during a pandemic requires doing more with less. The scarcity of resources can spur creativity, fuelling product development even when external circumstances pose daunting challenges.

Creative thinking starts with real-time tailoring of your product to the demands of the market as it exists now, not as it was before the pandemic. For example, Airbnb faced huge initial losses – nearly half its valuation – because of Covid-19, but the company wisely pivoted, offering revamped online experiences, reinforced cleaning and safety measures, and enhanced options for nearby stays for people wary of long-distance travel. After a rocky start to 2020, Airbnb got creative, adapted, and is now back on track for an IPO (Initial Public Offering) that has the potential to put the company in a dominant long-term position in its space.

Fast fashion offers another instructive example. With closed stores depressing demand, brands put their production expertise to work making masks and other personal protective equipment. At the same time, they worked to expand their digital footprint for online sales and renewed efforts to meet a growing customer preference for sustainable products.

For financial technology companies, getting creative with limited resources during a pandemic can mean employees wearing multiple hats, discovering and utilizing new tools for collaboration when working from home, and streamlining workflow to more quickly build, test, and finalize the product’s core features and functionality. Behind all of these steps is a recognition that time is a commodity that demands attentive management.

To make the most out of a difficult situation, clarity and transparency with your team are fundamental. If furloughs or staffing changes are necessary, you have to communicate directly about the situation. Explaining your expectations, especially for employees with expanded roles, keeps your team organized, and laying out the rationale for strategic and tactical decisions wins buy-in from your team and keeps everyone rowing collectively in the same direction.

Ready to launch

Facing dynamic circumstances like those caused by Covid-19, business leaders have to stay agile in order to bring a new product to market successfully. Reaching out to customers to stay up-to-date with their needs, zeroing in on your key priorities, and using creativity to find opportunities despite constrained resources combine to form a potent strategy that empowers entrepreneurial companies to launch new products even during a pandemic.