If I were a Product Manager at CommonBond

Introduction:

CommonBond, a student loan refinance company, has identified an opportunity to partner with employers to target their employees. This is a good idea for a few reasons. First, 59% of recent grads mentioned that they would prefer student loan refinancing benefits from their employer over additional vacation days. Second, 45% of recent grads are aware that some employers offer a student loan refinance benefit. Finally, when considering jobs, 32% of recent grads, consider it very important that their employer offers a student loan refinance benefit.

However, CommonBond’s competitors have paved in-roads in this partnership model, and CommonBond appears to be imitating their strategy. Hence, the most important task for the new PM at CommonBond is to make quick wins by identifying the best employers to partner with.

This analysis outlines my understanding of the core customer persona for this product, their pain points, how CommonBond can use its core competency to build a great product, and a framework to make quick wins in a scrappy way.

How CommonBond can delight customers by solving their pain point:

John Doe graduated! Money is deposited in his bank account every few weeks now!!! Unlike the last few years — John thinks less about some expenses and spends more money on his lifestyle. John is a different person after he got a job: His focus shifted to putting in hard work at office to launch a great career, and to enjoy a better lifestyle! Gone are the days when he shared a scrappy room with his classmates, John now has his own studio apartment… Gone are the days when he was going to college bars, John now goes to bars in Downtown… Gone are the days when John chose restaurants for which he had coupons, John now goes to restaurants that have an awesome ambience and unique cuisine… John now cares little less about saving money, as he used to, and cares more about having a comfortable lifestyle, and to perform better at work!

Trailing only payments toward a rent or mortgage, monthly student loan payments is John’s second-greatest expense at $409.97. Until John starts feeling the heat of his student loan, John is less concerned to refinance his loans — else he would have to re-live the pains he went through to get his education loan: the pains of finding an easy way to get a lower cost loan! More forms, more credit inquiries, more waiting and uncertainty, more holds on customer service calls, more anxiety, and more experimentation! But John’s focus now is to have a comfortable lifestyle, and to perform better at work! Only 20% of Johns are very confident that they understand loan refinance. John may not say no to a lower cost loan, but John may not try hard to refinance his loan, given the hurdles in the process.

During just another day at work, John gets an email from his HR team about a simple and trusted option through which his colleagues have refinanced their education loan. John get his questions answered through a friendly and trained customer service team that has partnered with John’s office. John learns that he can not only refinance his loan, but also return a favor by educating a child, like someone helped him with a scholarship, through CommonBond’s partnership with Pencils of Promise. Finally, John would also get an opportunity to meet driven new grads in his (new) city to build his network. If alone, John knew that through CommonBond he can refinance his loan and save $24k on average at 2.72% APR through a simple trusted process, John and 3.9 million new grads each year might refinance their loans.

But how can CommonBond make quick wins to reach out to 3.9 million new grads:

• The easiest form to identify employers who are top recruiters is to use publically available data. Here are links for top employers of Masters/MBA students and undergraduates (entry level). Though this data helps identify top employers by the count of hires, the PM may not be able to identify more data that will help prioritize partnership opportunities. For example, if the PM also knows the universities and courses these new employees attended, the PM would get a guesstimate on the median debt size for each employer. This data would radically change the prioritization of partnership opportunities. Market research indicates that for profit graduates, parents, independent undergraduates, and graduate students have more debt. Granular data will surely help the PM. But which data?
• The next easiest form to identify top employers is to visit websites of universities for each course, starting with the most expensive courses, to download employment reports and assimilate them to get the final data. This data can be obtained from University’s LinkedIn pages also. Though, the PM will get richer data and insights to prioritize the employers he can partner with to build the product, this process will be highly time consuming. However, it is better than the earlier approach, and can be used selectively until a better alternative is available.
• The better alternative is to partner with AACSB! Currently, 826 AACSB accredited schools offer MBA programs, and all these schools report data in the same format to AACSB each year. AACSB provides paid subscription accounts to download customizable reports, and multiple platforms to interact with universities, again something CommonBond can leverage from. Starting partnerships with MBA recruiters whose employees have the highest median tuition fees, and hence highest median debt, will help CommonBond to acquire big ticket loans faster, and to thereafter use this knowledge to acquire the long tail undergrad customers.