Should I deploy this?

Every outage postmortem has the same sentence in it: "we knew that was risky." This is the two-minute check that makes you say it before the deploy instead of after.

18 ways a deploy goes wrong. Each has a point value, a line on why it bites, and the fix. Go down the list, say Yes to the risks this deploy carries, get a score and a verdict.

Works in Google Sheets and Excel.

THE 18 RISKS

• Timing: Friday after 2pm, first deploy in weeks
• Rollback: no plan, migration with no backup, no kill switch
• Review: nobody else read it, 500+ lines, skipped tests
• Blast radius: auth, payments, DNS, secrets, dependency bumps, lockfile surprises
• Verification: never ran in staging, no smoke test, monitoring blind
• People: deploying and leaving, on-call does not know, copy nobody read

THE VERDICTS

SHIP IT, PROBABLY FINE, EYES OPEN, NOT TODAY, ABSOLUTELY NOT.

THE REPORT

Everything you said Yes to, worst first, with the fix next to it. That is the pre-deploy to-do list. Three deploys side by side.

What you get

• The checklist (.xlsx): Scorecard and Report tabs
• A 1-page quick-start guide

Who it's for

Anyone who deploys to production without a release manager standing behind them.

Good to know

• No macros, add-ons or sign-ups. Works in Google Sheets (free) and Excel 2016 or newer.
• Instant download.

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