When launch planning is worth the effort

We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. Launch planning is not free, and pretending otherwise leads to bad decisions.

The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

When it is worth it

Never launch on a Friday afternoon. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

When it is not

If nothing downstream depends on it and nobody is complaining, it can wait. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions.

How to decide

Announce it once the thing is verifiably working. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

What this looks like day to day

Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. Three things worth confirming about launch planning before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Have a rollback plan you have actually tested — 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.