· Engineering · 2 min read
What production ready really means in product engineering
A simple checklist for reliability, ownership, and long term operation.
What production ready means in product engineering is often misunderstood. It is not a badge you get at launch. It is a set of operational behaviors that keep a system stable after launch.
Start with reliability basics. Define availability and performance targets. Add timeouts, retries, and sensible defaults. Health checks should match real user paths, not just process status.
Observability and alerts
Ensure logs, metrics, and traces exist for core flows. Alerts should trigger action, not panic. Link alerts to short runbooks so the team can respond without searching.
Deployment and rollback
Automate deployments and keep rollback simple. Avoid manual steps during releases. Track every change with a clear audit trail so issues can be traced quickly.
Ownership and operations
Assign on call ownership and escalation paths. Keep documentation short and current. If nobody owns it, it is not production ready.
Add a short readiness review before major launches. A small checklist for risk, observability, and rollback is usually enough to catch gaps.
Production readiness is most visible after the first incident. If the team can respond calmly and restore service, the system is ready.
Define load and failure testing expectations. Even a simple load test before launch can expose performance limits. Add a small failure test, such as dependency timeouts, to validate resilience.
Include support readiness. If customers report issues, the team needs a clear intake path and response playbook. Production readiness is not just about code, it is about how you respond.
Keep production configuration simple and documented. If the system depends on hidden settings, it will be hard to reproduce and hard to recover.
