Phase 11 · Pre-customer checklist

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You are here: Playbook → Phase 11 · Pre-customer checklist This phase is for you if: you’re one step from the first real customer — technical + business + support must be real. Not this phase? Phase 12 = production cutover trigger.

The last gate before a paying customer touches the app. Phase 11 proves the production system is deployed correctly, secure, observable, and tested end-to-end — then confirms the business side (landing page, legal pages, pricing, support) is real, not a placeholder. Sign off here and you’re cleared to open registration.

Phase 11 — pre-customer readiness, four gates to launch

Technical readiness must be green before business/legal matters. Support + docs make the app usable; the tiered signoff is the final go/no-go.

Gate

Cleared for first customer — all 13 Tier-1 blockers pass, the production smoke path is green, legal pages are live, the support inbox is wired, and a rollback has been rehearsed at least once.

Before you start

This phase assumes the app is already live. Confirm the upstream work is done:

• Production deploy complete (the app responds on its real domain over HTTPS).
• Security hardening and the full QA/audit pass are finished.
• Monitoring and alerting (error tracking, uptime) are active.
• A rollback procedure has been tested at least once in staging.
• Emergency contacts and an incident runbook are documented.

Optional tasks are SHOULD, not skip

Tasks tagged SHOULD or OPTIONAL are not auto-skipped. Surface them and let the operator decide; if you skip any, list what was skipped at the end. “Fast mode” still reports its omissions.

Pages in this phase

1 · Technical readiness (MUST) The 7 MUST gates: git/deploy verify, codebase+security scan, DB confidence, env audit, E2E, monitoring, signoff prep.

3 · Business & legal Landing page, legal pages, transactional email, pricing & payment, analytics & social meta.

4 · Support & onboarding Support surface, five-minute time-to-first-value, and activation funnel tracking.

2 · Launch signoff (last) Tiered go/no-go — Tier 1 blockers (13/13), Tier 2 important, Tier 3 nice-to-have. Run this page last.

Start with Technical readiness, then business & legal, support, and launch signoff last.