Is There a Rollback Plan in Place for Every Deployment in Case of Unforeseen Issues?

In the fast-moving world of startups and scaling SMEs, technology is often at the forefront of both opportunities and risks. Rapid deployment cycles, constant iterations, and the pressure to innovate can sometimes lead businesses into situations where a misstep in deployment can cause significant issues. When this happens, it’s critical to ask: do we have a rollback plan in place? The answer to this question could mean the difference between a brief disruption and a catastrophic failure.

From my experience, this isn't a rhetorical question; it’s a fundamental practice that too many companies overlook. Startups, especially those growing quickly without senior technology leadership, often underestimate the importance of rollback plans in their deployment strategy. Having worked with businesses in the tech, fintech, healthtech, and SaaS sectors, I’ve seen first-hand the chaos that can ensue when rollback plans are not in place or when they are improperly executed.

Why a Rollback Plan Is Crucial

Deployment Failures Happen—Frequently.

No matter how rigorous your testing environment, unforeseen issues during deployment are inevitable. Variables that you didn’t account for in testing can rear their ugly heads in live environments, sometimes causing significant disruption to customers or even critical business operations. According to a study by Puppet, deployment failures occur in around 15% of deployments even in mature software organisations. Imagine what this figure looks like in a fast-scaling startup environment.

A rollback plan serves as a safety net. It allows teams to quickly revert the system to a previously stable state if something goes wrong. Without a rollback plan, you’re left scrambling to fix live issues on the fly—while your customers are suffering the consequences.

Strategic Misalignments Between Technology and Business Goals

For startups, technology is not just a back-office operation; it’s integral to the business. The alignment between your technology stack and business goals should guide every technological decision, including the implementation of rollback plans. However, one common challenge I’ve observed is that startups often deploy without considering the broader business implications. This misalignment can lead to strategic failures—such as releasing features that don’t perform well under scale or don’t align with evolving market needs.

A lack of a rollback plan leaves no room for course correction when these strategic misalignments manifest. As I noted in my experiences with growing companies, the absence of a rollback strategy can result in wasted resources and severely diminished ROI, compounding the initial failure with additional operational losses.

The Ingredients of a Good Rollback Plan

1. Automation and Speed

In a high-stakes environment like a live deployment, manual processes are your enemy. Automation is a game-changer when it comes to executing a rollback plan swiftly and accurately. Automating the rollback process ensures that, should anything go wrong, your team can revert to a stable version of the software almost instantly—minimising downtime and the impact on your customers.

The best teams I’ve worked with don’t just automate their rollback; they build the automation into their continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. This ensures that rollback processes are tested as rigorously as the deployment processes themselves.

2. Data Preservation

One critical aspect often overlooked in rollback strategies is data integrity. If you deploy a new version of your software that starts making changes to your databases and other data sources, rolling back can become complex. You can’t simply revert to the previous version of the software if the data structure has been altered.

A solid rollback plan must include strategies for preserving data integrity during deployment failures. This might involve snapshotting databases before deployment, maintaining compatibility layers, or employing feature flags to control data changes in a more granular way. In one particular SaaS firm I advised, we implemented a database versioning system that allowed rollbacks without affecting customer data—a strategy that proved invaluable during several high-risk deployments.

3. Communication

Rollback plans aren’t just about the code or the systems—they’re also about communication. Clear and timely communication across teams is critical to ensure that everyone knows what’s happening during a rollback. This includes the dev team, operations, customer service, and sometimes even key customers.

During one high-pressure deployment, I saw a company falter not because of the technical rollback itself, but because of a failure to communicate effectively. The rollback happened swiftly, but the customer support team wasn’t informed in time, leading to a flood of unnecessary complaints and a significant loss of trust. Make sure your rollback plan includes detailed communication protocols that are activated as soon as a problem is identified.

How to Build a Rollback Culture

Building a rollback culture starts at the leadership level. CEOs and founders must ensure that the internal narrative around deployments includes the expectation of failure and the need for rollback plans. This doesn’t mean pessimism; it’s about being realistic. The truth is that deployments will occasionally fail, and having a rollback plan in place is not a sign of weakness—it’s a sign of preparedness.

1. Embrace Failure as a Learning Opportunity

If you foster a culture where failures are hidden or downplayed, rollback plans won’t be prioritised. On the other hand, if you treat failures as an opportunity to learn and improve, rollback plans will naturally take centre stage. Make it clear that every deployment carries risk, and the best way to manage that risk is to have a rollback plan in place.

During my work with scaling SMEs, I’ve seen the culture of transparency transform how teams approach deployment. When engineers are allowed to report issues without fear, rollback plans become more refined, robust, and reliable. In one fintech company, shifting to a culture of transparency around deployment issues resulted in a 30% reduction in post-deployment incidents within six months.

2. Make Rollbacks Part of the Dev Cycle

Rollback plans should be as integral to your development cycle as your deployment processes. This means rollback strategies should be tested during the QA phase, not just considered in the heat of the moment when something goes wrong. By treating rollbacks as an essential part of the deployment, you ensure that your team is always ready to respond to the inevitable.

One common practice in larger, more mature organisations is to simulate deployment failures and practice rolling back as part of routine testing. This ensures that when a real failure happens, the team is familiar with the rollback process and can execute it smoothly.

3. Document and Refine

Documenting your rollback procedures is key to ensuring consistency. When a deployment fails, and you initiate a rollback, the last thing you want is confusion over how to proceed. Clear, detailed documentation helps avoid this and ensures that any team member can execute the rollback if necessary.

Furthermore, rollback strategies should be continuously refined. Every deployment provides an opportunity to learn, and your rollback plans should evolve based on the unique challenges each new deployment brings. In a fast-scaling startup, where deployment processes can change as rapidly as the product itself, this kind of agility is essential.

The Cost of Not Having a Rollback Plan

Without a rollback plan, the consequences of a failed deployment can be severe. Consider the following scenarios:

Revenue Loss: In eCommerce or SaaS, downtime directly translates to revenue loss. One fintech firm I worked with estimated that each hour of downtime cost the company over £100,000 in lost transactions. Rolling back to a stable version would have reduced that downtime to mere minutes.

Customer Trust: In the modern tech landscape, trust is currency. When your software goes down, your customers may forgive you once, but repeated failures without swift recovery will erode their trust. A healthtech company I advised saw a 10% drop in customer retention after a poorly managed deployment failure, simply because they didn’t have a rollback plan to revert the changes quickly.

Reputation: Beyond the immediate impact, the long-term damage to your brand’s reputation can be difficult to quantify but devastating to endure. In high-stakes industries like fintech and healthtech, even minor mistakes are scrutinised. Not having a rollback plan signals to investors, partners, and customers that your operations are not as robust as they should be.

Conclusion: Don’t Deploy Without a Safety Net

Every deployment carries risk. The key to managing that risk isn’t to avoid deploying; it’s to ensure that you have a rollback plan in place to safeguard your business. For scaling startups and SMEs, especially those without a permanent senior technology leader, this is an essential part of maturing your development processes. You can’t predict every issue that will arise during deployment, but you can prepare for them. Having a rollback plan is the safety net that ensures your business can recover quickly, protect its revenue, and maintain the trust of its customers.

If you’re not currently implementing rollback plans as part of your deployment strategy, it’s time to start. Your next deployment could be the one where having that plan makes all the difference.