A practical checklist for launch planning

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. Run through this the next time launch planning comes up.

The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

The checklist

• Never launch on a Friday afternoon
• Have a rollback plan you have actually tested
• Announce it once the thing is verifiably working
• Someone is named as the owner
• There is a date to review it again

What is actually at stake

Never launch on a Friday afternoon. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

In practice

Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. Three things worth confirming about launch planning before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Never launch on a Friday afternoon — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.