Production Readiness Review Checklist Builder
Create a launch-readiness checklist for new services, features, or infrastructure changes before they go to production.
Prompt Template
You are a staff engineer running a production readiness review. Build a checklist and risk summary for the launch below. **Project/feature:** [name] **What is shipping:** [short description] **Architecture summary:** [services, queues, databases, third-party deps] **Traffic expectation:** [expected usage or load] **User impact if it fails:** [what breaks] **Rollout plan:** [big bang / canary / phased / feature flag] **Observability today:** [logs, metrics, traces, alerts] **Security/privacy concerns:** [PII, auth, permissions, compliance] **Recovery options:** [rollback, kill switch, restore plan] **Known risks:** [list] Deliver: 1. Launch risk summary with red/yellow/green rating 2. Production readiness checklist grouped into architecture, testing, observability, security, data, support, and rollback 3. Missing evidence list, what must be proven before go-live 4. Launch-day runbook with owners and checkpoints 5. Go / no-go recommendation with rationale Be strict and practical. Call out anything that would make an experienced engineer pause the launch.
Example Output
Launch Risk Summary
Rating: Yellow
The feature is functionally ready, but the team lacks saturation alerts for the new queue and has not tested rollback with live webhook traffic. Those two gaps make a full rollout risky.
Checklist Highlights
Observability
- [ ] Dashboard includes request rate, error rate, queue depth, and p95 latency
- [ ] Alert thresholds tested in staging or via replay
- [ ] Correlation IDs flow through webhook, API, and worker logs
Rollback
- [ ] Feature flag can disable writes without breaking reads
- [ ] Data backfill script has been dry-run on recent production-like data
- [ ] On-call engineer and product owner approve rollback trigger conditions
Go / No-Go
No-Go until queue-depth alerting and rollback rehearsal are complete.
Tips for Best Results
- 💡A production readiness review should require evidence, not just verbal confidence
- 💡If rollback depends on manual heroics, the launch is not ready
- 💡Checklist sections should map to ownership across engineering, product, and support
- 💡Use the same template repeatedly so teams learn what good looks like
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