The not so trivial challenge of "secrecy vs. openness" is further complicated by the collision between our genuine desire to keep improving the quality of the new product at the expense of launch delay with the business critical time to market pressure. Inevitably executives/investors and sales want the product released sooner while the product team needs more time to add features and address any known defects.
While the differences between consumer and B2B markets affect product launch strategies, at the end of the day I have to agree with Eric Ries who advocates in his book ‘The Lean Startup’ - a methodology for continuously testing your assumptions as you bring new products and services to market, whether in a start up or in a traditional large software vendor company. A few chapters in and this is already resonating... The Lean Startup methodology is all about that - getting early versions of the product (what the author calls the ‘Minimum Viable Product’) into customers hands and empirically validating (or refuting) your assumptions about what they want, rather than spending months designing and building something that misses the mark...
I used to wonder how can the big companies (that seem to be taking calculated risk in introducing something really new to the market, like iPad for example) take the plunge and launch their products early enough, let alone earlier than expected. Just imagine new Windows OS came out earlier than planned simply because Microsoft wanted to get early customer validation…
