Launch Day Runbook

Overall Launch Progress
0% Complete (0 of 0 tasks done)

PRE-LAUNCH

T-7 days to T-1 day

Engineering: Deploy to production

Engineering T-2 days Assignee: Lead Dev

Engineering: All critical tests passing

Engineering T-3 days Assignee: QA Lead

Marketing: Finalize all marketing materials

Marketing T-3 days Assignee: Marketing Lead

PR: Brief journalists on embargo lift

PR T-1 day Assignee: PR Lead

Support: Documentation complete & live

Support T-2 days Assignee: Support Lead

LAUNCH DAY

Hour by hour execution

07:00 AM - All hands standup call

Leadership T+0h Owner: CEO

09:00 AM - Engineering final health check

Engineering T+2h Owner: Ops Lead

10:00 AM - Go/No-Go decision

Leadership T+3h Decision: CEO + Leads

10:30 AM - Press release distribution

PR T+3.5h Owner: PR Lead

11:00 AM - Email announcement to customers

Marketing T+4h Owner: Marketing Lead

11:30 AM - Social media posts go live

Marketing T+4.5h Owner: Social Manager

12:00 PM - Real-time monitoring begins

Engineering T+5h Owner: DevOps

02:00 PM - First customer support escalation check

Support T+7h Owner: Support Lead

06:00 PM - End-of-day wash-up call

Leadership T+11h Facilitator: CEO

POST-LAUNCH

Day 1 to Day 7

Day 1 (EOD): Incident review & all-hands debrief

Leadership Day 1 Owner: CEO

Day 2: Performance metrics analysis & trend report

Analytics Day 2 Owner: Analytics Lead

Day 3: Customer feedback survey launch

Support Day 3 Owner: Product Lead

Day 5: Post-launch media roundup report

PR Day 5 Owner: PR Lead

Day 7: Full post-launch retrospective

Leadership Day 7 Facilitator: VP Product

REAL-TIME MONITORING

Live metrics on launch day
System Uptime
99.9%
Target: 99.5%
API Response Time
245ms
Target: <500ms
Error Rate
0.02%
Alert: >0.5%
Active Users
1,247
Real-time count
Signups (Today)
342
Target: >100
Support Queue
8
Avg response: 12min

ROLLBACK CRITERIA & PROCEDURES

Trigger Rollback If:

Rollback Steps:

  1. CEO + Lead Engineer assess severity
  2. Alert all stakeholders (async + Slack)
  3. Engineering initiates database/code rollback
  4. Verify functionality on canary users (5%)
  5. Gradual rollout to 100% or full revert
  6. Post-mortem scheduled within 24 hours

COMMUNICATION TEMPLATES

Copy-paste ready messages

Press Release Header

[CITY, STATE] – [Month Day, Year] – [Company] today announced the launch of [Product]. [One sentence description]. Available at [URL]. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Customer Email Announcement

Subject: We're Live! [Product Name] is Now Available Hi [Name], We're thrilled to announce that [Product] is officially live today! [2-3 sentence product value prop] Start here: [CTA Link] Questions? Reply to this email. Best, [Team]

Internal Launch Message

We did it! [Product] is live as of [Time]. Metrics so far: - Uptime: [%] - Signups: [#] - Support tickets: [#] Real-time dashboard: [Link] Thank you all for the hard work.

Social Media Post

✨ We're live! [Product Name] is now available to everyone. [Tagline]. Try it free: [Link] #Launch #NewProduct