Countdown to Launch: Behind-the-Scenes of our Next Big Launch 🌊🚀

Communication

Communication cadence increases as everyone comes together to ensure everything is right. You have one impression to make, and you want the launch to be a positive experience for new users. Therefore, from project managers to QA team, and everything in between, we are what’s called in period of regression. This means as we find bugs, or decide on final tweaks, we report the final set of tasks, and test to ensure we are getting the results that we are after. And we hunt down and kill as many bugs as possible in preparation for go/no-go launch conditions. Communication between all parties is critical. We leverage all kinds of communication systems internally and with our client.

Documentation

In preparation for transitioning the product over to our clients, a series of documents and assets are handed over and reviewed. Inheriting and transitioning a custom application can be a delicate handover. We begin crafting documentation with important Read_Me files, ensure that admins have proper access, permissions, and training to support and maintain the system. We even create video assets. Imagine a library of screencasts that show you how to manage the use cases for the new application. Management on both sides prepare for the knowledge transfer and begin practicing setup and core workflows before launch.

Reviewing Project Management Boards

Keeping progress across all tasks is key to prevent anything major from falling in between the cracks. Project managers and key stakeholders review the status of all final engineering tasks and regression being completed. A flood of tasks get completed at a higher speed than ever, so teams need to be more organized than before in preparation for product-launch conditions. As all the cards come in at the end, everyone is eager and excited per all the hard work that has reached an apex. The final checklist and countdown begins as a launch-window is decided.

Preparing for Press/Marketing

In our case, we enjoy building 2-sided marketplaces, scalable SaaS apps, and mobile applications that will be used by potentially a large userbase. Therefore, it isn’t just about the application. A parallel track of public content needs to be prepared across a variety of channels. These can look like any of the following:

• Press releases
• Social media posts
• New website launch
• Designing sales decks
• Preparing for events
• Developing marketing campaigns
• And more

Mirroring Staging and Production Servers

Before going live, we ensure that our infrastructure and server environments are synced up, backed up, and fully functional. DevOps teams prepare for not only launching but also stabilizing hosting environments and preparing for maintenance schedules post release. This is where versioning and branching occurs. The goal here is ensuring a stable application release and preparing for future upgrades. If anything happens with a production push, knowing you have everything backed up helps mitigate risk for our clients. Having a staging server allows us to test a variety of elements that doesn’t affect the production server. Our lead engineers are monitoring the services and making sure we have green lights across the board.

Planning Maintenance

When you release a serious new digital application offering and say: “Hello World”, you are not done. These systems can be considered living breathing organisms and need TLC. While the team may be reduced to a minor head count, you still plan for simple upgrades and continued bug fixes over time.

Customer Support

When you launch digital products, you are likely launching a support system as well. Users expect a positive experience, and this means answering questions, providing support, and keeping up with documentation. It is also a dance where you are evaluating the feedback your users are sharing with you. This means you must plan proactively and set up the rules of engagement for support. Whether it is support-ticketing, a call center, or hybrid, preparing your staff for the inquiry of support questions takes time and dedication.

Final Retro Session

Although we are an agile production team and have sprint and monthly retros, post launch time is a great period to reflect on the project and fine tune how to make things better for the future. This can include features sets that didn’t make the launch, discuss new features that could impact users in the future, and plan for resources and skillsets to participate in the project moving forward. Typically, launching the first version for an application represents the first chapter for the client’s story.