Field Notes
A pre-launch checklist that includes rollback honesty
Launch checklists love green boxes. Second opinions look for the steps nobody wants to rehearse: partial migration and rollback.
Pre-Launch Technical Second Opinion work is less about finding new bugs in happy-path demos and more about asking whether the team can reverse a half-applied change.
A useful rehearsal:
- Dual-write is on; new path fails for 2% of tenants — what is the stop condition?
- Feature flag turns off; do in-flight jobs finish on the old path?
- Schema migration is forward-only — is that accepted, documented, and owned?
We mark items green, amber, or red. Red does not always mean “cancel the launch.” It means leadership should consciously accept the risk or change the plan. The worst outcome is a silent amber that everyone assumed was someone else’s green.