Rollout

What Is a Rollout?

Rollout is an informal business term for the introduction and integration of a new product or service to the market. A rollout often refers to a significant product release, which is frequently accompanied by a strong marketing campaign, to generate consumer interest. There can also be rollouts of new changes within a company across the board to operationalize a new procedural or structural change.

Understanding Rollouts

Product Rollouts

As mentioned, a product rollout is a business, marketing, and operations strategy that deploys a new product to the masses. Mostly, this refers to the strategy behind a product's initial introduction, although it can also extend to long-term operations.

Such a strategy can play a part in the product's success or failure. Some products, for example, are given limited rollouts targeting a particular region or set of customers. This may be designed to enhance customer interest in other regions or market segments. Often times, technology companies introducing a new app, for example, will choose to do only a North America rollout. By slowly rolling out their services, companies can more manageably control and limit the size of any challenges or bumps along the way. For an extended period of time, food delivery companies such as Postmates and GrubHub would only service their respective headquarters in San Francisco and Chicago. Now, other companies such as Uber have done global rollouts of their products and subsequent features such as Uber Pool ride-sharing.

Operational Rollouts

A rollout in business may also refer to the implementation of a new system within a company. A company may refer to its rollout strategy for its new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, which could include the entire company or only select departments. Rollouts are typically large changes requiring concerted efforts, and the field of organizational change management in and of itself is a booming one. Organizational change management and the rolling out of new processes, structures, or systems allow a business to scale and more effectively operate. However, done poorly, a rollout can cause a lot of dissatisfaction among team members. For this reason, limited rollouts of internal systems offer the advantage of harming productivity less than a full rollout.

Types of Rollouts

There are multiple types of rollouts, including rollouts:

Ultimately, carefully executed product rollouts to targeted groups of people or within a company can be the make-or-break factor for its success.