Live
Launch Planning Checklist
Check all the boxes to make sure you're ready to go live.
Pre-requisites
- A release candidate with acceptance evidence
- Named service and operational owners
- Completed readiness assessments and transition plans
What you'll get
- A launch readiness checklist with owners and evidence
- Blocking gaps added to the delivery roadmap
- A recorded launch decision with conditions and rollback triggers
Why launch is more than releasing software
Launch transfers a service into real operations. Users, support teams, data, vendors, policies, and incident processes must work together from that point.
A product can function correctly and still fail because ownership or operational readiness remains unclear.
Why use a readiness checklist?
Launch gaps often sit between teams. A shared checklist brings product, accessibility, privacy, security, operations, training, and communication evidence into one decision.
Every item needs an owner and evidence. Plans and good intentions cannot prove that the service is ready.
Why define rollback before launch?
Real conditions can expose problems that testing missed. Clear rollback triggers let the team protect users without debating thresholds during an incident.
What you leave with
The readiness checklist records the launch scope, evidence, owners, gaps, approvals, and operating conditions.
Blocking work stays visible in the roadmap. The final decision records who made it, which risks remain, and when the team must reconsider.
Further Reading
- - Assign owners, blockers, communications, testing, monitoring, and follow-up for a major release.
- - Plan phased rollout, acceptance testing, release responsibilities, operations, and post-release evaluation.
- - Prepare service operations and transition while scaling access safely through beta.
- - Check security, metrics, accessibility, uptime, monitoring, testing, quality, and support readiness.
- - Gather evidence and independent assurance before moving to the next phase.
- - Use auditable deployments, staging, smoke tests, and tested rollback procedures.
- - Establish monitoring, response plans, production-like testing, and sustainable reliability practices.
- - Forecast support demand, assign staffing, set service levels, and capture feedback.
- - Prepare alerting, on-call roles, playbooks, communications, and incident learning before launch.
- - Plan coordinated recovery for disrupted systems, operations, and data.
- - Coordinates architecture, capacity, failure modes, monitoring, rollout, and operational ownership before launch.
- - Provides concrete checks for reliability, failover, monitoring, capacity, dependencies, and operational readiness.