LISA18

One of the most “high stakes launch” you can do is the April Fools Prank (AFP). The usual best practices don’t always work and there is no second chance: you can’t just re-launch on April 2nd. Many silos must sign off on the plan, yet the plan must be kept secret. Beta testing is particularly difficult. Loads shift from zero to millions in one day with little room for mistakes.

In this talk, I’ll discuss how to communicate across the company to get buy-in, how to load test using “dark launches”, rollbacks using feature flags, and other techniques for assuring a high stakes launch happens correctly. I’ll include stories from many AFPs both that I’ve observed and been a part of.