The main purpose of releasing new features is driven by the business need to meet customer demand and offer a better product than your competitors. When releasing a new product you’ll be primarily concerned with:
- the time taken from finishing development of a feature to getting feedback from customers
- ensuring that your code doesn’t break when exposed to real, production traffic (whether or not it worked in testing and QA)
If a product takes too long to launch then you run the risk of releasing something that no longer satisfies customer demand or being beaten to market by a competitor and appearing to play catchup.