- Technical deployment. Detect any obvious technical problems.
- Employee-only release. Detect any obvious product problems. Easier to do with business-to-consumer (B2C) products, harder to do with business-to-business (B2B) products depending on your level of domain expertise.
- Public release to “1%”. I put 1% in quotes because it’s really answering, “What is the minimum # of, and/or specific, users needed to detect whether there are obvious product problems?”
- Scale up incrementally toward 100% release. Detect problems that only show up with larger scale. May roll back to lower % due to detecting scaling problems. May abandon if you learn that the likely impact is not worth scaling to 100%.
- 100% release.
