Before you invest in post-launch support

We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. Before you spend anything on post-launch support, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.

Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

Prerequisites

• You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
• Someone owns it after the work is done
• Launch is the beginning of the maintenance period
• You have a way to tell whether it worked

Where it usually goes wrong

Decide who owns fixes before you need them. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

Budget for it or it comes out of goodwill. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

What this looks like day to day

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

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Decide who owns fixes before you need them — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.