Launch Readiness Checklist

Feature completeness

• All acceptance criteria for the feature are met and verified in a staging or pre-production environment.
• Edge cases and error states have been tested — invalid input, network failures, permission boundaries.
• Automated test suite passes (unit, integration, and end-to-end where applicable).
• Performance impact has been assessed — no unacceptable regressions in latency or resource usage.
• Security review is complete if the feature touches authentication, authorization, payment, or user data.

Documentation

• User-facing documentation (help center, guides, API reference) is written and reviewed.
• Internal runbooks are updated for on-call engineers (known failure modes, escalation steps, rollback procedure).
• Changelog or release notes draft is prepared for the launch announcement.
• SDK or integration docs reference the new feature where relevant.

Support readiness

• Support team has been briefed on the feature scope, expected behavior, and known limitations.
• FAQ or troubleshooting guide is available for common questions the support team may receive.
• Escalation path from support to engineering is defined and communicated.

Communication plan

• Internal stakeholders (product, engineering, marketing, sales) are aligned on launch timing and messaging.
• External communication is drafted — blog post, email, social, or in-app announcement — and scheduled for launch day.
• If the launch affects pricing or billing, customers who may be impacted have been notified in advance.

Progressive Rollouts

If the feature is being released via a Progressive Rollout, complete the dedicated Progressive Rollouts Readiness Checklist before activating the rollout. The items below are the high-level prerequisites — the linked checklist covers flag setup, monitoring, rollback planning, and team communication in detail.

• Feature flag is created, published, and configured in the target environment.
• Rollout mode (Manual or Automatic) and initial percentage are decided.
• Monitoring, alerting, and performance baselines are in place (see rollout checklist — Monitoring).
• Rollback and pause criteria are documented and the team understands the procedure (see Progressive Rollouts Playbook).
• All items in the Progressive Rollouts Readiness Checklist are complete.

Go / No-go

• All Pre-Launch checklist sections above are complete.
• No active incidents or ongoing deployments that could interfere with the launch.
• On-call coverage is confirmed for the launch window and at least the first 24 hours after.
• Stakeholders have given final go/no-go approval.

Activate

• Feature is activated — rollout started, flag published, or deployment triggered.
• Dashboards and alerting are visible to the team in a shared channel or war room.
• External communications are published (blog post, changelog, email, social).
• Smoke-test the feature in production immediately after activation to confirm it behaves as expected for real users.

Monitoring period

• Error rates remain at or below pre-launch baselines for at least one full traffic cycle (typically 24–48 hours).
• Latency (p95/p99) has not regressed beyond acceptable thresholds.
• Business metrics (conversion, activation, transaction volume) are stable or trending positively.
• Support ticket volume is within normal range — no spike correlated with the launch.
• If using a Progressive Rollout, each stage is monitored before advancing to the next (see Playbook — Phase 2: Monitor).

Success criteria

• Success metrics defined before launch have been measured and meet the target thresholds.
• User feedback (in-app, support channels, social) is reviewed and any critical issues are triaged.
• Team has agreed on whether the launch is successful or requires corrective action.

Rollout completion decision

• Decision recorded: complete the rollout to 100 %, hold at current percentage for further monitoring, or roll back.
• If completing, the rollout is advanced to 100 % and the flag's permanent value is set.
• Cleanup task is scheduled — remove the feature flag from code and configuration once the feature is fully shipped (see Governance Checklist).
• Post-launch retrospective is scheduled to capture what went well and what to improve.

Related resources

• Progressive Rollouts Readiness Checklist — pre-rollout checklist covering flag setup, monitoring, rollback planning, and team communication.
• Progressive Rollouts Playbook — step-by-step guide to configure, monitor, expand, and complete a rollout.
• Kill Switch and Incident Rollback — the fastest path from incident detection to mitigation without a redeploy.
• Governance Checklist — naming, ownership, and lifecycle hygiene for flags before and after rollouts.