Agile development of digital products has become the de facto standard and is achieving remarkable success in terms of development speed, predictability and quality.29 The development process is not strictly linear according to the waterfall principle, but iterative. After repeated adjustments and further development, the product can eventually be shown to the masses – at an introductory event, the launch event.
Product launch describes the process of introducing a new product to the market. It is the “start-up phase of the operational marketing of a new product, which involves many different communication products that are used by diverse departments of the company for different target groups at different times and depending on the phase in the customer project”.30
Product success is closely related to the perfection with which the product launch is carried out. If it fails, there usually won’t be a second chance – think of the big launch events in the automotive industry. If something went wrong here, it would probably be talked about rather than the successes. Usually, a launch event is held only once, but it is done correctly. As part of the digital transformation of a company, a launch event for a digital product such as a company APP that has been developed in an agile manner may well be repeated more often – for example, when the user group is expanded and also when the new users need to be picked up or when the product itself has been further developed and new functions are to be launched. And since we are moving in the context of digitalization, it is absolutely natural that the launch event itself will also take place virtually!
29 Book – Fundamentals of Agile Product Development. Basic knowledge of Scrum, Kanban, Lean Development, Joachim Pfeffer (Peppair GmbH 2019), p. 13
30 Book – Product Marketing for Engineers: Effective Sales Support in International Mechanical Engineering, Michael Nitsche (Walter de Gruyter GmbH 2019), Chapter 6.2
