--- title: Launch: Measuring a Release Before and After description: What gets measured before launch, what gets watched after it, and the handover that means your team can maintain the thing without calling me every week. canonical: https://www.hire-web-dev.com/process/launch/ section: Process updated: 2026-09-11 author: SumanKumar Phuyal site: hire-web-dev.com note: >- Generated from the page of record at the canonical URL above. The four case studies are placeholder work and their metrics were never measured; imagery is AI-generated concept art. See https://www.hire-web-dev.com/disclosure/. --- # PHASE THREE — LAUNCH The phase people skip. Instrumentation, budgets locked into continuous integration, a real handover, and two weeks of watching the thing behave in the wild. ## Before the switch Real-user monitoring goes in before launch, not after, so there's a baseline to compare against when someone claims the new site feels slower. Performance budgets go into CI as a failing check. Error tracking is wired up with enough context to be actionable, which mostly means capturing what the user was doing rather than only what the stack trace says. ## Handover A recorded session walking through the architecture, the decisions and the known rough edges, plus written documentation of the same. The most valuable section is always the list of things I chose not to do and why — that's the knowledge which otherwise evaporates the moment I stop answering messages, and it's what stops the next engineer from cheerfully reintroducing a problem I already solved. I also hand over the assumption log from discovery, annotated with which assumptions held and which didn't. It's an uncomfortable document to produce and it's genuinely useful next time either of us estimates something similar. ## The two weeks after Included in the phase. Real traffic finds things no test plan does — the device nobody owned, the connection pattern nobody simulated, the content editor who does something entirely reasonable that I never considered. I'd rather be there for it than be re-engaged in a hurry a month later. ## Key facts - Duration: 1 — 2 weeks - Includes: Handover session - Monitoring: Two weeks post - Budgets: Enforced in CI ## Checklist - RUM: Before launch - Budgets: Failing CI check - Handover: Recorded + written - Watch: Two weeks included ## Topics MONITORING, CI BUDGETS, ERROR TRACKING, HANDOVER, POST-LAUNCH ## Image ![Brilliant white burst throwing cyan shards outward against black, the moment a build goes live](https://www.hire-web-dev.com/assets/img/launch-phase-light-burst.jpg)