Creating a Production Launch Plan

You are responsible for a cool new product with excellent feedback from user studies, and you can’t wait to get it into end users’ hands. You publish a spectacular press release and sit back, ready to enjoy the praise indicating that your product has surpassed people’s dreams. Your product’s hashtag shows a great reception, at first. Then you start noticing some complaints. Your operations team pages you that things are melting down.

What happened during the product launch? It could be that when the entire world took notice, the product’s code collapsed under the heavy load; or that the infrastructure the product relies on responded to the shockwaves of load by rejecting requests, to protect from unexpected attacks; or that the people overseeing the launch were not prepared to execute on a coordinated response. A launch plan can prevent these kinds of issues by involving all relevant parties and processes to help ensure a controlled progression through the launch.

In this report, we describe the components of a launch plan at Google and offer practical methods you might apply to reduce production launch risks for your own products. We include lessons we have learned about what works well for launching Google products, including large products, new features for existing products, and even small products. The lessons we describe are adaptable for consumer-oriented services regardless of company size or a product’s user base. How much control you ...