5. Release & Monitor

Launch isn't the finish line, so it doesn't get treated like one. Analytics, event tracking and error monitoring go in before release, not bolted on after someone asks why nobody knows what's happening. The rollout itself is deliberate — staged where it makes sense, watched closely either way.

That means the first week produces real behaviour instead of opinions in a meeting: what people actually clicked, where they dropped off, what broke under real traffic. That data is the raw material for Iterate & Optimise, not a retrospective for its own sake.

In practice, that's a dashboard already wired up before launch day, not a Slack thread asking ‘does anyone know how it's going?’ a week later.