Product Launches: An Analysis of the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 — An Explosive Launch!

Dante & Itzel | Travel, Careers and Lifestyle

7 min readJun 22, 2019

The majority of new product launches fail and, while updates to existing products fare better, launches are fraught with unexpected quality issues and disappointing business results. Below, I will be discussing Product Launches — why the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 failed and strategies to improve your chances for a smooth market deployment.

An overview of the Galaxy Note 7 & what this product was trying to achieve

In 2016, Samsung launched its Galaxy Note 7, a successor to the Galaxy Note 5 smartphone. The new features of this phablet phone (smartphone + tablet), known for its “mini tablet” large 5.7 in. screen, included: a water-resistant screen and stylus, an expanded high quality curved display on both sides of the phone to make it easier and more comfortable to hold, an iris security scanner, high-dynamic-range (HDR) video support, and a series of additional stylus features (from translations, to screenwriting, glancing at multiple screens, and much more) and enhanced software for the pen.

The Goal: The Galaxy Note 7 was trying to appeal to people’s desires for bigger screens, more user-friendly and comfortable phones, and their main distinction from iPhones, an enhanced, or as they called it, “intelligent” stylus to make the user experience more personable, and easier for their users to navigate between screens. Essentially, it was a fancy, yet innovative, virtual notepad.

How was the product launched? What do you think are some of the concerns the PM may have had?

The product was launched around mid-August of 2016 in the U.S. market and Australia, and made its debut in the UK in early September. Within two days, there were over 200,000 pre-orders made in Korea, which caused shortages in supply, and delayed product release dates in some international markets.

Using the Scope-Time-Quality framework Professor Ken introduced in class, can helps us understand how the Galaxy Note 7 was launch and what were some of the concerns the PMs were experiencing. Given the there was high anticipation and strong demand for this new and innovative smartphone model, there was a lot of pressure on Samsung engineers to meet deadlines, and make tradeoffs. Having an aggressive time to market (TTM), PMs and engineers had to take some shortcuts to increase the supply of Note 7 phones. The external factors influencing the “Fast and Furious”product launch for the Note 7, include facing extreme pressure from Apple, their direct competitor, as they also launched the new iPhone 7 in September. On a race to meet expectations, and be the first to market, Samsung really had to step on the pedal and accelerate its product to market. Internally, what this meant is launching a product without having done enough testing and quality assurance analysis on the phones and the batteries, which lead Samsung to ship a smart phone to the hands of millions of consumers around the world that was not ready to be used, and bypassed the safety concerns of potential users. All of these mistakes and “tradeoffs,” really pointed to a failed product launch, since problems on the devices were not detected early on, engineers and PMs had to made the wrong decisions, and they did not have enough time to spend testing the phones, and designing a safe product.

Here are the numbers on the product launch: Within the first week of its launch Samsung received several reports of the Note 7 catching on fire. According to Time Magazine (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site., Samsung received over 90 reports from U.S. users, that the phone batteries were overheating. For more specifics, Time reveals that “26 reports of burns and 55 reports of property damage. A man in Florida says his vehicle caught fire when the Galaxy Note 7 smartphone charging inside his SUV burst into flames.” This even lead the largest airlines (United, American, and Delta) to take action, and to instruct all of their passengers to keep their Note 7’s off until they get off the plane. During the first weeks of September, Samsung stop selling the Note 7 and ordered a recall of over 2 million phones around the world.

As aforementioned, major concerns of the PM centered on how to manage and revert the crisis caused by launching a product that had not been tested enough because engineers were pressured to manufacture devices as fast as possible and cut many corners along the way. Here are the key areas a PM would be considering in this situation:

Quality and Product Health:

Why did we bypass product testing and safety concerns?
Did we test enough the stability of our batteries and chargers?
How can we design a safer product, and keep the user’s safety in mind while building new devices?
Can the phones be refurbished? / Can the battery defects be fixed?
How can we continue competing/differentiating ourselves from iPhones in regards to quality?

Managing Stakeholder Expectations:

What is the best and most strategic way to respond and compensate our users for our failed product launch?
What is our contingency plan for addressing this issue(internal and external)?
How can we rethink our corporate structure to ensure that engineers/manufactures have a say in the testing and development of our products?
How can we (re)build customer loyalty? What are some brand management strategies to work on improving our brand?

The Fourth Dimension — Costs and Resources:

How can we recover some costs and resources to prevent another major product defect and launch?
Can we allocate more resources (time, scope, quality) towards product design and testing for the future? What are we willing to give up/”tradeoffs”?

Ethical dilemma — assuming the responsibility of the product defects as Samsung and not blame partner manufacturers

Ultimately, in summary, a PM in charge of the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 would have had to consider why it was so important to have such an aggressive time to market and analyze the pros and cons of this situation:

Shipping a product fast but with many problems -> customer disappointment
Extreme technical debt -> low maintainability, will require us to rebuild it
Project death march -> team overworked, lack of pride in the failed outcome

If the product failed, what happened? What do you believe were the underlying causes? Elaborate.

Samsung found that what caused the phones to overheat was a defect in the design of the phones’ batteries when they were manufactured, that made the electrodes of the battery pliable which produced short circuits and caused the phones to overheat, and eventually catch on fire and explode.

Here is a diagram that explains what is inside a lithium battery:

As can be seen in this visual, there is an extremely thin layer that separates the positive and negative layers, and if the battery is squished it can easily create a short-circuit.

Some of the actions that were taken in attempts to address this catastrophe, were replacing the phones, trying different types of batteries, and even software updates to minimize battery capacity to prevent the phone from overheating, but none of these ideas worked and this was a costly product failure for Samsung.

Here is an overview that summarizes the main causes of the “explosive” batteries found in Samsung’s Note 7’s that cause this product to fail and really hurt their brand:

The underlying causes point to not enough testing done to ensure that the product’s quality and health were in good condition for potential consumers to use the product, especially when a phone is overheating and catching on fire, this could have been noted if the batteries were tested more. Having an aggressive deadline lead the engineers and PM to be rushed to push the product to market without having enough time for QA testing, and analyzing the design of the phone batteries. Additionally, the pressure from Apple and the iPhone 7 which came a few weeks after the Note 7, was one of the main reasons why Samsung placed extreme pressure on its designers, manufacturers, and engineers to ship the product early on.

Nevertheless, this product launch serves as a big reminder and it is a clear lesson for PMs and engineers of what NOT to do when launching a product. By falling into the trap of time and sacrificing quality and scope, launching a product without having done enough testing cost Samsung billions of dollars, they lost the reputation and strength its brand had, and most importantly, lost the trust and loyalty of its users. Time will tell, if Samsung new Galaxy phones will be able to make up for the explosive launch of the Note 7.

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