Release Planning & Execution with a Checklist

Using checklists to prevent failure

Yasmin Nozari

Published in

The Startup

4 min readAug 1, 2019

I live by to-do lists.

I make them for everything in my life. I put everything I need to do on a list, from domestic tasks like ordering groceries, folding laundry and making banana bread out of the stinky bananas on the kitchen counter to work-focused ones like sending an email to XYZ by 9 am and scheduling a meeting with so-and-so.

I jot all my to-do’s down in either my work notebook, post them on my desk, hang them up on the kitchen cabinet, or give each one a time in my iOS reminders app. I have multiple to-do lists running at the same time. They are everywhere and take multiple forms, but they all serve the same purpose: remind me to never forget XYZ.

A few years ago, I read the Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gwande and was reminded of their power. In the book, he discusses the functionality of the checklist in several elements of daily and professional life, but most explicitly in hospitals. It is a fascinating story on how the simplest of things, can reduce errors, plan for failure, and improve patient outcomes. (He also writes about in this New Yorker article.)

“Checklists seem to provide protection against such failures. They remind us of the minimum necessary steps and make them explicit. They not only offer the possibility of verification but also instill a kind of discipline of higher performance.”― Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right

Gawande’s thesis motivated me to expose my checklist habit to my teams, so I created the Release Checklist to help me plan for a Product Release.

A Product Release is the process of launching a new product or feature set into the market. It usually involves multiple departments and multiple stakeholders be aligned on all the components of the release. Every Product Release needs a leader to make sure that all the components of the launching of a new product or feature set goes on without a hitch. There is an extraordinary amount of detail that goes into planning and executing a Product Release, and the leader (usually the product manager) needs to work across departments to ensure that everyone knows the plan, is okay with the plan, and follows thru on the plan. The ingredients to any product release is preparation, planning for failure, and communication, and transparency. The Release Checklist makes that possible. It aligns all the teams (ex:engineering, design, customer support, marketing, sales, operations, legal, finance) on the components and tasks associated with the product release.

The Release Checklist replicated within seconds in a Google Sheet. Its simplicity behind it is what makes it work VERY well. I have used this for over 30 production releases with teams ranging from 20–80 people. The simple format is as follows:

Tasks: Input every. single. thing. that needs to be done to make the release. From designer and engineering tasks, to legal components, to meeting with the leadership team to review communication copy, to drafting the communication copy, to prepping the customer support automated messages, to training the teams, to updating the company website, etc. I am not kidding when I say that every idea needs to be put on this list so you don’t forget anything. The more detail the better — this prevents you or anyone from forgetting and also shows your team the amount of detail that goes into it.
Owner: The person responsible for completing the task.
Status: To do!, In Progress, or Done!

Here are some tips for how to make the Release Checklist an effective organization tool.

Share the list with everyone on your team on Slack and pin to the channel so it doesn’t get lost in the thread.
Go over this list in standup meetings to make sure that everyone is held accountable to everything on it
Review the tasks
Confirm the ownership
Update the statuses
Add more tasks that might come up
Give this checklist life! If needed, create meetings to review this checklist.
Use in addition to your team’s project management tool (Clubhouse, Jira, Trello, etc. ). The Release Checklist should be available to everyone, and not everyone might have access to your team’s project management tool.
If one of your tasks on the Release Checklist has a story card in your project management tool, link to it.
Add every single thing that needs to happen to make the release happen.
Optional — Group the tasks by the responsible or just make a long list — your preference.