Make every launch a big deal

Published September 3rd, 2025

by Rachel Marison, LaunchDarkly Engineer

Some questions for anyone who has ever launched anything:

• Do you ever feel like you’ve worked super hard on a project, only to release it without much fanfare, and immediately move on to The Next Big Thing?

• Are you ever uncertain about what exactly has changed since the last bug bash for the feature your team is about to launch?

• Do you ever find yourself missing the opportunity to thank your teammates for their work, until several days later at the next team planning meeting or retro?

These are some of the things that we noticed about our launch processes on the Release Monitoring team, and we wanted to change that. So when we launched the new context counts chart, we all hopped on a call together for a ✨ Launch Party ✨

Okay, I’m using the word “party” loosely here. But this is what we did:

🤝 Made sure that everyone on the team was on the same page about the state of the feature:

• Reviewed what changes/fixes were implemented since the last bug bash

• Reviewed what non-launch-blocking changes were in-progress or coming-soon as fast follows

🚀 Created a guarded rollout together, and triggered the release! All while hyped up as a team, with the help of some cute context counts themed zoom backgrounds:

😎 Took a moment to acknowledge how cool this work was, why we built it in the first place, and how much it will impact our customers:

• In this particular case, the context counts chart is something that we’ve gotten repeated feature requests for. Customers are always wanting to answer the question “how many users have seen my new feature?”. It was very motivating to explicitly recognize that our hard work would finally empower users to answer this important question.

🎉 Shouted out all the folks who made this launch successful.

A Launch Party template

If you’re interested in doing something similar for your next launch, you can follow this template to create your own launch party doc:

What’s new?

• List any updates and details on what has been fixed since the last round of bug bashing

What’s coming up?

• List any work that will be addressed after the launch as fast-follows

Let’s release <cool new feature>!

• You can use this section to note the guarded rollout configurations you plan to set, or link to the guarded rollout approval request

Shout-outs!

• Explicitly call out the importance of this feature

• Tag folks on the team and shout them out for how they’ve contributed to the project and the launch

That’s it!

Just good vibes ☀️ all around. It was such a small and casual thing, but it was super effective in bringing the team together, getting everyone on the same page, and celebrating both the new feature and everyone’s contributions.

In the age of guarded rollouts and remote work, it’s almost too easy to release new features under the radar. Releasing something doesn’t have to be a big deal, because you know you’re launching safely with guarded rollouts. But celebrating that release? That should be a big deal.