Shipping And Launch

Shipping and Launch

Overview

Ship with confidence. The goal is not just to deploy — it's to deploy safely, with monitoring in place, a rollback plan ready, and a clear understanding of what success looks like. Every launch should be reversible, observable, and incremental.

When to use

• Deploying a feature to production for the first time
• Releasing a significant change to users
• Migrating data or infrastructure
• Opening a beta or early access program
• Any deployment that carries risk (all of them)

Do not use for CI pipeline setup (ci-cd) or for writing the production code being launched.

Process

1. Clear the pre-launch checklists (code quality, security, performance, accessibility, infrastructure, documentation) in references/launch-playbook.md.
2. Ship behind a feature flag. Deploy with the flag off, then enable for team → canary → gradual → 100%. Every flag has an owner and an expiration. Clean up within two weeks of full rollout. Do not nest flags. Test both states in CI.
3. Advance only on green thresholds. Error rate within 10% of baseline, p95 latency within 20%, no new client error types. Hold or roll back using the table in the playbook.
4. Watch the first hour. Health 200, no new error types, latency unchanged, critical flow works, logs flowing, rollback ready.
5. Have a rollback plan before deploy. Flag off in under a minute beats a revert. Know the database story (preserve vs clean up) before you need it.

Red flags

• Deploying without a rollback plan
• No monitoring or error reporting in production
• Big-bang releases (everything at once, no staging)
• Feature flags with no expiration or owner
• No one monitoring the deploy for the first hour
• Production environment configuration done by memory, not code
• "It's Friday afternoon, let's ship it"

Verification

Before deploying:

• Pre-launch checklist completed (all sections green)
• Feature flag configured (if applicable)
• Rollback plan documented
• Monitoring dashboards set up
• Team notified of deployment

After deploying:

• Health check returns 200
• Error rate is normal
• Latency is normal
• Critical user flow works
• Logs are flowing
• Rollback tested or verified ready

References

• references/launch-playbook.md — checklists, flags, staged rollout, monitoring, rollback plan
• Workspace definition-of-done — apply it first
• security-hardening, performance-optimization, frontend-ui-engineering/references/production-ui-checklist.md for the matching pre-launch slices