On this page
What we check early on Retail: Launch Runbook, what usually goes wrong in production, and how teams avoid a rewrite six months later.
Who this is for
Instrument the happy path and the ugly path. Silent failures are what turn a launch into a weekend incident.
Decisions that still look smart in 18 months
Use boring technology where the risk is operational. Save novelty for the one wedge that makes the product worth buying.
Build checklist we actually use
Ship a thin vertical slice, measure, then widen. Big-bang rewrites rarely survive the first month of real traffic.
Failure modes we keep seeing
Ignore the buzzwords. For Retail: Launch Runbook, the hard constraint is usually data ownership or ops capacity — not how many features fit on a roadmap slide.
How we measure rollout
Teams that write trade-offs down before coding burn fewer sprints when a stakeholder changes their mind mid-build. We keep ADRs short on purpose.
We update this when delivery patterns change on live client work.