Playbook
Production Readiness Checklist
Production readiness means the team can deploy, observe, secure, support, and recover the system without improvising during an incident.
Best reader
Founders, CTOs, and delivery teams preparing a launch
Outcome
A launch checklist that reduces operational risk before users arrive.
Use this sequence
Confirm CI/CD and environment separation.
Validate QA coverage for critical workflows.
Set monitoring, logging, alerts, and health checks.
Prepare rollback and incident response steps.
Review security, secrets, backups, and access.
Make deployment repeatable
A release should be a known process, not a manual sequence only one person understands.
CI/CD
Environment variables
Database migrations
Version tags
Observe before launch
You should know how the system behaves before customers are depending on it.
Health checks
Error tracking
Structured logs
Business metrics
Prepare recovery paths
Recovery planning is what turns incidents into controlled operations.
Rollback
Backups
Incident owner
Communication plan
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Frequently asked questions
When should production readiness work start?
It should start in sprint one. CI/CD, environments, observability, and security are delivery foundations, not launch-day extras.
What is the minimum launch checklist?
CI/CD, staging, critical QA, monitoring, backups, rollback, access control, and an incident owner.