Why most launch checklists fail
Not because they are missing items. Because nobody owns the items. A checklist with twelve unassigned tasks is a list of things everyone assumes someone else is doing, and on launch morning you discover the overlap was smaller than you thought.
Every item below has a role attached. Change the roles to real names before you use it.
Seven days out
- Confirm the actual stock number: Ops. Not the Shopify number: the number after you subtract damaged units, pre-orders, and anything committed to a wholesale order.
- Set the stock floor and who can breach it: Founder. A number, and one name. Write it down where the team can see it.
- Agree the dispatch promise with the warehouse: Ops and Warehouse together. Support cannot invent this on the day.
- Write the support macro using that promise: Support. Exact wording, approved in advance.
Two days out
- Staff the warehouse for the window: Warehouse lead. Including the two hours after the sale ends, which is when the picking actually happens.
- Check the ad creative points at the right SKUs: Paid media. Surprisingly often it does not.
- Set the pause trigger and permission it: Paid media and Ops. Whoever watches stock must be able to pause spend without asking.
- Lower your alert thresholds for launch products: Ops. A threshold of 10 is useless when you sell 14 an hour.
Launch morning
- Open the room and pin the two decisions: Founder. Stock floor and support promise, at the top, visible.
- Assign the four watchers: Ops. Stock, spend, queue depth, and the floor. Four numbers, four names.
- Confirm everyone can actually see the counter: Ops. Someone always cannot, and it is always the person watching stock.
- Set a hard time for the post-launch reconcile: Founder. One hour after sell-out, before anyone leaves.
Number 12. The reconcile is where you catch oversells while they are still cheap to fix. Skip it and you find them on Thursday, in a customer email, after the parcel has shipped.
After the launch
Write the recap the same day. Not a retro. A recap. What sold, what ran out first, what the queue peaked at, and which of these twelve items you skipped and got away with. The next launch is a copy of this document with the wrong assumptions corrected.
We wrote more about the day itself in how to run a flash sale without losing your team.