Twenty minutes before a scheduled deploy, someone noticed the pricing page in the release branch still had last quarter's numbers - the ones we'd already told customers were changing that day.
Nobody had done anything wrong, exactly. The copy update lived in a different pull request than the code change, and the two had been reviewed by two different people, on two different days, neither of whom had reason to open the other's diff.
What actually caught it
Not a test. Not a checklist. A person who happened to read the page like a customer would, out loud, in the standup, because we'd started doing that as a habit three weeks earlier for an unrelated reason.
The one change we kept
Any release that touches a customer-facing price, term, or claim now gets read aloud, verbatim, by someone who didn't write it, before it ships - Tuesday or not.
We don't pretend this catches everything. It caught this. That was enough to keep it.
Discussion