So, you’re releasing a new product. How hard can it get?

If you’re a business owner with an awesome new product that is finally ready to go live. You might want to hold on before scheduling a demo or launching a big marketing campaign before your app is completely functional. And I mean functional live version.

This may seem obvious, but in business — there is always an urge to be first, best and to beat the competition ASAP. So it can be very easy to rush things since the developers have already finished with everything, and you’ve already checked the demo version, which looks good. But things rarely go as planned when you’re about to roll out your product. Of course, there are deadlines and business requirements that are too crucial to ignore, but if you try your best to follow a few rules — your release process will be a lot smoother and you’d get a better chance to launch the best product. So here are a few simple recommendations on how to release without pain.

Always set deadlines for at least a week in advance.

As I said, things rarely go as planned, so it’s never a bad thing to have some spare time in case you’d need to add or update something important to your app. And in case things go wrong (and they probably will) you would have time to fix everything up.

This may seem a bit weird. Why would you have to do that? If the work can be done a week before the deadline — then what’s the point of setting a deadline. I’m not sure why, guess it’s a psychology thing, but the person may slow down because of knowing about that extra time yo have. It’s not that you shouldn’t trust your developers, just s human nature. You may have noticed that it’s a lot harder to discipline yourself if you don’t owe it to anyone. For example, it’ll be a lot easier for you to get out of bed at 5 am if you need to get ready for an urgent meeting, than if you’re decided to go for a morning jog. The same thing works here.

Never schedule any demo or marketing until your product is live.

This is quite the typical situation in web development (and probably in other types of development too). You’ve done with an active phase of development, everything works fine on the demo server, and your team is wrapping up with minor fixes and QA. All that’s left is to push it live. So you’d think, that it’s ok to schedule a release at the end of the week. But that’s not the best move. An app can behave differently in different environments, and “pushing it live”-part usually requires a couple of days to set up. So, you’re at risk, to end up without a website on your big day. Another thing is there’s a big chance, that you haven’t done any load testing, and on the preview stages your app was used by 4–5 people tops. This may also be an unpleasant surprise if your app gets a higher number of visitors and won’t be able to handle the load.

So, I wouldn’t recommend scheduling any marketing/demos until you have a stable version of a live application.

Create an app part specifically for a preview.

If you have to show something on a strict deadline, that you know you’re not able to meet — you may have to create the demo-version of the app, that does just whatever you need to show. It’s not a scam as long as you aim to deliver the full-featured version of the app later. The game industry has been doing it for years with teasers and gameplay videos. This is a better option. Even if you meet the deadline — rushing in at a crazy phase with a bunch of late nights won’t give you anything except unstable and barely working code.

You will benefit more from releasing a small demo to keep people interested in your product. And your team will keep rolling at a good phase with no stress.

Never deploy on Friday night ☺

I know, this superstition is probably the most widespread for the developers around the world. Even thou I personally don’t believe in this kind of stuff — but Friday night deploys just never go without problems. And your team will be at the office, bringing everything back to normal, until the late night of Saturday. I guess it’s due to the fact that everyone is tired and lost their focus at the end of a week. And the deployments at the end of the week always feel rushed and uncalled for. Sure, there may be circumstances that you’re unable to change or the deadlines you have to meet. All I’m saying is that you should avoid Friday night deploys, whenever it is possible. It’s even better to set the deadline to Thursday instead. Your team may have to work harder, but you’d have a better chance to roll out smoothly. And no one will work overtime on Saturday.

Conclusion

In this matter — there are always strict deadlines and rough business requirements, so you’d probably face issues most of the time. But if you always plan ahead — you will be able to minimize the pain for your team and you would get a better demo and more stable product for yourself. So keep these simple things in mind, and of course, never deploy on Friday (Unless you really have to☺).