Boring Launch

Our company is launching a big product. Well, it's a few big products packed under one Big Bang Launch. Multiple product groups across the org were working on it for many months. Yes, I’m also not a big fan of big bang launches. It’s not in our company's DNA. But this time the company went through this route. So we had a launch date and goal. Everything in between is another story.

We were part of this launch. We worked very hard to make it happen. There were all classics involved - scope changes, design revisions, product cuts, and shifting deadlines… shit hit the fan.. multiple times. But today is the day.

It’s Thursday. Means we had a few days this week to do final checks. Last QA sessions. Last UI polishing PRs. Quick look into dashboards and runbooks. Last read through the rollout plan. Alignment sessions across groups. It almost feels like the last 20% of the progress takes 80% of the effort. 

...But not this time…

Team intentionally tried to make it boring. As predictable as possible. My previous experience in infrastructure did me a favor. Lesson I learnt - any changes should be boring. 

When you are working with databases - any actions should be predictable. You should know what’s going to happen next. What will happen in a few steps ahead? How does the rollout start and how does it end? What potential problems might happen and how to solve them. What to do in a situation when some unexpected incidents happen and how to mitigate them.

It can be boring, but it does the job.

Think about watching a movie where you know the plot. There’s no surprise. That’s the exact feeling we wanted for our product release. We aimed for no surprises during the launch.

Since we are aiming to be product market leaders, we knew we had to set the standard. Quality was crucial - it was at the forefront of every decision we made throughout. It shows what your brand really is about. It’s the cherry on top!

And here we are - a team in the room, all dashboards prepared, we have a cross-group rollout plan, so we know what we are going to do each hour. We had standup updates, stayed in the room, and got pastries to celebrate.

Our time came. We turned on the feature flag. That’s it. Everything is live. Just monitoring dashboards. Day gone. Nothing unexpected.

Boring Launch.

Ideal Launch.