How to use this playbook
Treat each numbered item as a yes / no gate for the week before production. A “no” is not automatically a launch blocker: it becomes a tracked risk with an owner, a compensating control, and a dated remediation. We print this list during the final readiness review and annotate margins with evidence links (Lighthouse JSON, ticket IDs, signed legal PDFs). If an item cannot be verified in staging that faithfully mirrors production, record the delta explicitly in the release runbook.
Veltris assumes Next.js on Vercel or equivalent edge-aware hosting, but most checks apply to any SSR / hybrid React deployment. Defer items that do not apply, but do not silently skip — mark N/A with rationale so the next engineer inherits context.
Scope and limits
This checklist is about readiness, not feature completeness. It will not tell you whether the product should ship — only whether the technical, operational, and compliance envelope around the launch is honest. It is biased toward EU-facing sites because that is where our clients most often get surprised (cookie law, processor registries, aggressive regulators on consumer claims). Where we cite tools (curl, Lighthouse, axe), swap equivalents you already pay for; the method matters more than the vendor.
Ownership
Engineering leads execution, but several items require explicit sign-off from Security, Marketing / Content, Finance / Legal, and Support. If your organisation collapses those roles into founders, the same person can sign — the signatures still need to exist in writing somewhere durable.