Chapter 2 of 12

Operational Readiness: The Multidimensional Audit

Evaluating technical infrastructure, marketing assets, support capacity, and legal compliance.

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What You'll Learn How to set up support tiers, build an internal FAQ, and keep your status page honest.

Support Tiering: Who Answers What?

If your Lead Engineer is answering "How do I reset my password?" emails, you have failed. You must triage.

Tier Staffing Responsibility SLA (Response Time)
Tier 1 (L1) Support Agents / Chatbot Common questions, FAQs, account issues. < 15 Minutes
Tier 2 (L2) Technical Support Bug verification, data issues, complex config. < 4 Hours
Tier 3 (L3) Engineers Code fixes, server outages, data correction. (As needed)

The Status Page: Radical Transparency

When you go down (and you will), trust is maintained through transparency. Do not hide outages.

Status Page Hygiene
  • Host Externally: Don't host your status page on your own infrastructure (if AWS goes down, your status page goes down). Use Atlassian Statuspage or similar.
  • Update Frequency: Every 30 minutes during an incident. Even if the update is "We are still investigating."
  • Tone: Empathetic but technical. "We apologize" + "We are restarting the cluster."

Internal Enablement (Dogfooding)

Your team must use the product before the public does. Find the "Internal FAQ."

The Internal FAQ

Before launch, have every employee (Sales, Marketing, HR) try to complete the "Golden Path" (Sign up -> Value). Record every question they ask. Documentation written by Engineers for Engineers is useless for Users. Write your FAQ based on these internal struggles.

Technical Readiness Audit

Your tech must handle launch stress. Traffic spikes, DB writes, and slow APIs can hurt users right when first impressions matter most.

Load Testing

Validate that infrastructure can support projected traffic:

  • Stress test to 1.5x expected traffic
  • Identify the bottleneck (CPU, Memory, DB connections)
  • Configure auto-scaling groups (K8s HPA)
  • Test database under concurrent write load

Feature Flags

Decouple "deployment" from "release":

  • Deploy code days in advance behind flags
  • Canary releases to 5% of users first
  • Kill switches for instant feature disable
  • Percentage rollout controls (10% → 50% → 100%)
Third-Party Dependency Check

Audit your APIs (Stripe, Twilio, SendGrid). If email gets throttled, launch stalls. Raise quotas in advance.

Go-To-Market (GTM) Readiness

Marketing readiness means consistent messaging and assets ready across all channels.

Asset Category Requirements Owner
Press Kit Logos, screenshots, exec bios, product one-sheet Comms
Website Pricing page, feature page, landing pages ready Web Team
Email Waitlist announcement, welcome sequence loaded Marketing
Social Launch posts scheduled, hashtags defined Social
Paid Ad creative approved, campaigns ready (paused) Demand Gen
Influencer Swipe copy provided, embargo dates confirmed Partnerships

Legal and Compliance Readiness

Often missed, but it can kill your business if you skip it.

Data Privacy

Ensure new features comply with GDPR/CCPA. If an AI feature sends data to a third-party processor, update the privacy policy.

Terms of Service

Update ToS to reflect new functionality, liabilities, or billing structures. Have legal sign off 1 week before launch.

IP & Licensing

Confirm all open-source libraries comply with licensing requirements. Run a license audit as part of the final build.

Sales Readiness Checklist

Sales can't sell what they don't get. Prep them before you send leads.

Sales Enablement Must-Haves

  • Updated Pricing Sheet: 48 hours before website update
  • Battle Cards: Competitive positioning one-pagers
  • Demo Environment: Pre-populated with "perfect" data
  • Objection Handling: Top 5 objections with responses
  • Feature Deep-Dive: 30-min training session recorded
  • Lead Routing: SLA defined (Enterprise vs SMB)
Prepare Your Team

Ensure your support and operations teams are ready. Use our checklist to verify tooling, access, and training.

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Works Cited & Recommended Reading
Lean Startup Methodology
Launch Readiness & Strategy
  • 3. "Goals, Readiness and Constraints: The Three Dimensions of a Product Launch." Pragmatic Institute
  • 4. "I Launched a SaaS and Failed - Here's What I Learned." Reddit
  • 5. "SaaS Product Development Checklist: From Idea to Launch." Dev.Pro
  • 6. "10 Biggest SaaS Challenges: How to Protect Your Business." Userpilot
Metrics & KPIs
  • 7. "The Essential Guide to Product Launch Metrics." Gainsight
  • 8. "Product launch plan template for SaaS and B2B marketing teams." Understory Agency
  • 9. "SaaS Metrics Dashboard Examples and When to Use Them." UXCam
  • 10. "B2B SaaS Product Launch Checklist 2025: No-Fluff & AI-Ready." GTM Buddy
  • 11. "The Pre-Launch Metrics Imperative." Venture for All
  • 12. "Average Resolution Time | KPI example." Geckoboard
  • 13. "Burn rate is a better error rate." Datadog
Stakeholder Alignment
  • 14. "Coordinate product launches with internal stakeholders." Product Marketing Alliance
  • 15. "Comprehensive SaaS Product Readiness Checklist." Default
  • 16. "Launching with stakeholders - Open-source product playbook." Coda
  • 17. "Product launch checklist: How to ensure a successful launch." Atlassian
Launch Checklists & Process
Runbooks & Execution
  • 20. "Runbook Example: A Best Practices Guide." Nobl9
  • 21. "10 Steps for a Successful SaaS Product Launch Day." Scenic West Design
  • 22. "SaaS Outages: When Lightning Strikes, Thunder Rolls." Forrester
  • 23. "Developer-Friendly Runbooks: A Guide." Medium
  • 24. "Your Essential Product Launch Checklist Template." VeryCreatives
  • 25. "87-Action-Item Product Launch Checklist." Ignition
Press Kits & Marketing Assets
  • 26. "How to Build a SaaS Media Kit for Your Brand." Webstacks
  • 27. "Press Kit: What It Is, Templates & 10+ Examples For 2025." Prezly
  • 28. "How I Won #1 Product of The Day on Product Hunt." Microns.io
Messaging Frameworks
  • 29. "Product messaging: Guide to frameworks, strategy, and examples." PMA
  • 30. "Product Messaging Framework: A Guide for Ambitious PMMs." Product School
Runbook Templates & Automation
Dashboards & Real-Time Monitoring
  • 39. "8 SaaS Dashboard Examples to Track Key Metrics." Userpilot
  • 40. "Real-time dashboards: are they worth it?" Tinybird
  • 41. "Incident Management - MTBF, MTTR, MTTA, and MTTF." Atlassian
  • 42. "SaaS Metrics Dashboard: Your Revenue Command Center." Rework
  • 43. "12 product adoption metrics to track for success." Appcues
Crisis Communication
  • 44. "How to Create a Crisis Communication Plan." Everbridge
  • 45. "10 Crisis Communication Templates for Every Agency Owner." CoSchedule
  • 46. "Your Complete Crisis Communication Plan Template." Ready Response
  • 47. "Crisis communications: What it is and examples brands can learn from." Sprout Social
Retrospectives & Learning
  • 48. "What the 'Lean Startup' didn't tell me - 3 iterations in." Reddit
  • 49. "Does Your Product Launch Strategy Include Retrospectives?" UserVoice
  • 50. "Retrospective Templates for Efficient Team Meetings." Miro
  • 51. "50+ Retrospective Questions for your Next Meeting." Parabol
  • 52. "Quick Wins for Product Managers." Medium
  • 53. "Showcase Early Wins for Successful Product Adoption." Profit.co
Observability & Tooling
  • 54. "The Lean Startup Method 101: The Essential Ideas." Lean Startup Co
  • 55. "Grafana: The open and composable observability platform." Grafana Labs
  • 56. "The essential product launch checklist for SaaS companies | 2025." Orb Billing

This playbook synthesizes methodologies from DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Incident Command System (ICS), and modern product management practices. References are provided for deeper exploration of each topic.