July 19, 2023
Major launches need an engineering “Release Captain” independent of a Project Manager.
While a Project Manager can and should be in charge of things like cross-functional coordination, burndown charts, and other gory process details, they are ill-equipped to oversee the launch from an engineering perspective. This talk covers what makes a good Release Captain including topics like:
- How to think about rollout stages:
- Do you need a percentage ramp-up?
- Over what cadence?
- Cross-platform rollout considerations
- Go/no-go conditions and health checks
- Rollback strategy planning
- Environment planning for sustained QA
- Cross-functional dependencies like help content and customer service traffic
- Delegation and aggregation.
The Release Captain can’t do everything, but they can aggregate and review what feature owners produce in order to make sure the aggregated launch will be successful.
July 19, 2023
