Launch Strategy

How Should We Rollout Our Product?

A gradual rollout is the safest choice for a software product:
- Allows you to closely monitor performance metrics to identify issues and make any necessary fixes before launching to everyone. Oftentimes you might run into bugs at scale that you could not catch or predict before rolling out
- Gives you an early read if the product is on track to achieve goals
- Easy to rollback the launch if any major issues arise
A full launch makes more sense for a:
- Hardware product. Once a product is on the shelf it has to work for any user who purchases it. You can still do beta testing, but it will be more challenging to get a physical product to your target users. Additionally, you can't just "push" a new feature to an existing physical product like you can with software since you are limited by the capabilities of the hardware.
- "No-brainer" product. It is a low-risk launch if your team is confident that the product will be well-received in the market and will work as expected.
It also may make sense to do a full launch to meet a product goal or a legal requirement. There may be times when leadership decides that the need for immediate revenue is worth the risk of launching an imperfect product. Or changes in law, that require product updates for compliance, like GDPR privacy regulations in Europe.

For a new product, a gradual rollout involves launching the product to a small or geographically contained group of users
For a new feature on an existing product, you'll want to make the feature available to a select group of users of the existing product.
You'll want to be strategic about the number of users you start with. You need enough users to get a good read on the users' reception of the project and to make sure any issues are uncovered. You will almost always want to start with 1% on the first day
After launch, monitor KPIs and user feedback
- No issues -> release the product to more users.
- If KPIs look problematic or issues appear in user feedback, halt the rollout or roll the feature back. Fix it and try again.

SOLUTION:

Both the Apple App Store and Google Play support gradual releases for feature updates: