Camille SuttonLVL 6

@camille-sutton · Jul 9

A rollback plan nobody has to read

Every build ships with one page: what to switch off, in what order, and who is allowed to.

The rollback page is written during the build, not after it, because a plan written under pressure is a plan written by the person with the least information and the most adrenaline.

It has three parts and it never exceeds one page. The order of switches, from the least disruptive to the most. What each switch leaves behind — half-finished work does not vanish, it queues somewhere, and the page says exactly where. And the named person, with a second name under it, who is allowed to make the call without asking.

We test it once before handover, on purpose, at a quiet hour, with the team watching. It takes twenty minutes and it changes the way people talk about the build for the rest of the engagement. A team that has seen the off switch work stops treating the system as something that happens to them.

Almost nobody ever uses it. That is the point. The page is not insurance against failure so much as permission to adopt something quickly, and adoption is the thing we were actually hired to produce.