Field Notes · 18 April 2026
Cutover rehearsals that feel slightly boring
The best go-lives are dull: freeze rules, named approvers, and a rehearsal that fails on purpose.
Excitement is a poor indicator of cutover readiness. We look for boredom: a runbook that someone else can read aloud, a freeze window that sales leadership already accepted, and a rehearsal that intentionally breaks a non-critical step.
Fail on purpose once
Pick a safe failure — pause the label printer job, revoke a staging credential — and watch whether the team finds the restart step without calling the person who wrote the doc. If they cannot, the runbook is still tribal knowledge.
Freeze is a product decision
Engineering cannot invent a freeze alone. Merchandising must know which campaigns pause, and warehouse leads must know which manual edits stop. Our go-live accompaniment engagements put those names on the first page of the runbook.
After the first real orders
Schedule a thirty-minute debrief the same day. Capture residual issues while memories are sharp. Many “mystery” sync bugs are actually two people editing the same order during the freeze gap.
Dull rehearsals protect weekends. Keep them dull.