Rollback

A rollback is reverting your live product to a previous working version when a new release causes problems. Something ships, errors spike or a key flow breaks, and instead of frantically patching forward under pressure, you switch production back to the last known-good version in seconds. For a lean founder, a fast rollback is what makes shipping often feel safe rather than terrifying. It turns a bad deploy from a crisis into a minor blip: revert first, restore calm, then diagnose the root cause without customers staring at a broken screen. The ability to roll back cleanly depends on discipline upstream, version control so you can identify the last good build, and database changes designed so old code still works against the new schema. Build that safety in and you can move fast precisely because mistakes are cheap and reversible, not because you never make them.