This story is as old as outsourcing. In order to be efficient, a software supplier needs to understand his Client’s business as well as the revenue extraction model.

To do this we analyze market and segment end customers for the client’s product. We are doing enormous job and design innovative revenue generation model, extract MVP and plan to launch unique IT-idea for our Client.
We need to realize MVP, bring it to market and develop it in correspondence with end users’ requirements. Of course, we offer Agile. So, the product is planned, MVP is realized and we can’t wait until we develop a better idea, which we have ever developed for all times: cloudy, mobile, social and powered by analytics and prediction.
But a new product launch is always being postponed.

Sound familiar?

Notably, this situation is not usually observed with the development of already existing on the market IT-ideas.
The reason is that neither Client nor software vendor thought about thorough consideration of go-to-market launch plan.

Whose neglect is it?

Client does not have to know how to bring IT-ideas to market. Client is doing his\her business and for IT issues he\she employs us, the software vendor. On the other hand, it is not possible for us to know all details of our Client’s business, partially due to the fact that some of these details is business sensitive information. Software vendor usually knows about his\her Client’s business what is called «enough to know».
As a result, we have the situation, in which «we need to realize a bit more: this-one integration and this-one functionality». Terms are violated, launch is postponed several times and both Client and software vendor are disappointed and tired of constant expectation.

What should be done to avoid this?

Having analyzed the products already launched by us for our Clients in USA, Ukraine and Japan, we have come up with such conclusions:
- It is necessary to separate the activity of product deployment and launch into individual project or subproject. The reason for doing this is that projects for product development and projects for its launch to the market have different sets of stakeholders.
- It is necessary to gather business-requirements for such product separately and together with experienced in deployment or DevOps business analysts: product deployment and launch is not a project on software creation. It is integration project and approaches should be appropriate.
- Risk-plan for the IT-product market launch project should contain points, connected with uncertainty while integration with Client’s existing systems and processes.
- Situation with «forgotten», but critical while launch functionality is inevitable on every level of planning integration processes.

Last point should be looked at separately. In our practice, it is necessary to plan 8,5% of iteration team velocity for realization of such “forgotten” functionality as critical for the Client from the point of view of business returns from bringing to market new IT-product. Tell the client about this work scope and you get the flexibility you need.
Such approach will let you meet the launch deadline without the need to negotiate a supplementary budget for implementation of the "forgotten" functionality. If software vendor was able to plan and provide everything 100%, so mentioned above 8.5% off the budget can be offered to the Client as part of the budget for further product development.