Shipping and Launch

Prepares production launches with checklists, monitoring, staged rollout, and rollback strategy.

When to Use This Skill

Trigger conditions:

• User preparing to deploy to production
• User asks for pre-launch checklist
• User setting up monitoring
• User planning staged rollout
• User needs rollback strategy

Pre-Launch Checklist

Code Quality

• All tests passing
• No console.log in production code
• Error handling covers expected failure modes

Security

• No secrets in code or version control
• npm audit shows no critical/high vulnerabilities
• Input validation on all user-facing endpoints
• Authentication and authorization checks in place
• Security headers configured (CSP, HSTS)
• Rate limiting on authentication endpoints
• CORS configured to specific origins (not wildcard)

Performance

• Core Web Vitals within "Good" thresholds
• No N+1 queries in critical paths
• Images optimized
• Bundle size within budget
• Database queries have appropriate indexes

Monitoring

• Error tracking configured
• Latency monitoring in place
• Health check endpoint available
• Logging configured

Staged Rollout

Strategy

## Staged Rollout Plan

### Stage 1: Internal (5-10%)
- Who: Internal team
- Purpose: Smoke test in production-like environment
- Duration: 1-2 days

### Stage 2: Beta Users (10-25%)
- Who: Beta users / power users
- Purpose: Real-world testing
- Duration: 2-7 days

### Stage 3: Percentage Rollout (25-100%)
- Who: All users
- Purpose: Full release
- Duration: Based on stability

Rollout Metrics

Monitor:

• Error rate
• Latency (P95)
• Conversion rates
• User feedback

Rollback Strategy

Every deployment needs a rollback plan:

## Rollback Plan

### Trigger Conditions
- Error rate > 2x baseline
- P95 latency > [X]ms
- User reports of specific issues

### Rollback Steps
1. Disable feature flag (if applicable)
OR
1. Deploy previous version
2. Verify rollback
3. Communicate with team

### Time to Rollback
- Feature flag: < 1 minute
- Redeploy: < 5 minutes
- Database rollback: < 15 minutes

Post-Launch Verification

In the first hour after launch:

1. Check health endpoint returns 200
2. Check error monitoring dashboard
3. Check latency dashboard
4. Test critical user flow manually
5. Verify logs are flowing
6. Confirm rollback mechanism works

Common Rationalizations

Rationalization	Reality
"It works in staging, it'll work in production"	Production has different data and edge cases
"We don't need feature flags"	Every feature benefits from a kill switch
"Monitoring is overhead"	Without monitoring, users tell you about problems

See Also

• references/security-checklist.md - Security pre-launch checks
• references/performance-checklist.md - Performance checklist
• references/accessibility-checklist.md - Accessibility verification