Launch review

Launch review

A launch review is the last gate between a build and its users: a structured check that the thing is truly ready and that named people have said so on the record. It rots into theater when it becomes a rubber stamp, a meeting where everyone assumes someone else looked and no one holds the authority to stop the train. The whole point is to keep "no" a real and cheap option right up to launch.

Method

1. Drive the review from a written readiness checklist. Functionality verified, error budget healthy, monitoring and alerts wired, rollback tested, legal and privacy cleared, support and docs ready, comms drafted. A checklist turns "are we ready" from a vibe into items that are each done or not.
2. Give every checklist item a named owner who signs. Not "engineering approves" but a specific person per area: the on-call lead for operability, privacy counsel for data, the support lead for readiness. A sign-off without a name is a gap nobody owns.
3. Require the rollback and kill switch to be exercised, not just present. The most common launch-day failure is a revert path that was written and never run. Demand evidence it worked in a realistic environment, with the time-to-revert measured and recorded.
4. Name one launch owner who holds no-go authority. A single person can halt the launch, and the room knows who it is before the meeting starts. Diffuse authority is how a known-broken launch ships, because stopping it felt like someone else's call.
5. Set explicit go, no-go, and conditional-go outcomes. Conditional-go names the exact blockers and who confirms they cleared before traffic ramps. "We'll fix it right after launch" is a no-go wearing a go's badge.
6. Plan the ramp and the watch, not only the flip. Staged rollout by percentage or region, the metrics that define healthy, the threshold that triggers rollback, and who is watching during the window. A launch is not done when it starts; it is done when it is stable.

Checks

• Does every checklist item carry a named owner who actually signed, not a team label?
• Has the rollback been executed and timed, or only documented?
• Is there one person who can say no, and does the room know who it is?

Boundaries

Match the ceremony to the blast radius: a flagged internal rollout does not need the review a public payments launch demands. This skill covers the go decision; the deeper operational readiness of the service underneath belongs to the production-readiness-review skill, and post-launch failures route to a postmortem.