Five mistakes teams make with launch planning

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit launch planning.

Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

The mistakes we see most

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• Never launch on a Friday afternoon
• Have a rollback plan you have actually tested
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

Announce it once the thing is verifiably working. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

Making it stick

How to tell if yours is fine

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

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.