While a Project Manager can and should be in charge of things like cross-functional coordination, burndown charts, and other gory process details, they are ill-equipped to oversee the launch from an engineering perspective. This talk covers what makes a good Release Captain including topics like:

• How to think about rollout stages:
  • Do you need a percentage ramp-up?
  • Over what cadence?
  • Cross-platform rollout considerations
  • Go/no-go conditions and health checks
• Rollback strategy planning
• Environment planning for sustained QA
• Cross-functional dependencies like help content and customer service traffic
• Delegation and aggregation.

The Release Captain can’t do everything, but they can aggregate and review what feature owners produce in order to make sure the aggregated launch will be successful.