Score this release

Changes to how customers use the product: new or changed workflows, behaviour changes, relearning, deprecations, or potential confusion.

Risk that customers feel worse about the product or company because of this change, even if it's technically simple to build: for example removing a well-used feature, changing something customers value, or reducing perceived quality. Independent of implementation effort, migration risk, or the communication/enablement work scored elsewhere. Score the emotional or reputational reaction here.

Operational customer communication that makes customers aware something is changing and why: advance notice, service interruption, workflow change notice, action required, migration notification, or implementation guidance.

Documentation, knowledge base, training, demos, webinars, onboarding, or education.

Rollout planning, customer health, proactive outreach, adoption tracking, and playbooks.

Customer data changes, migration, ability to restore a customer's prior data state, downtime, data protection, or customer-required migration action.

Configuration, integrations, customer-specific setup, services work, or specialist involvement needed to deliver this release. Data migration itself is scored under Data & migration. This dimension covers the setup and integration work around it, not the migration itself.

Technical or release risk if something goes wrong: can the release itself be rolled back, and what's the business interruption if it can't. Excludes data restore capability (see Data & migration). This is about whether the release can be safely reverted, not whether customer data can be recovered.

Pricing, packaging, licensing, billing, contracts, entitlements, revenue, sales process, or monetisation impact.

Commercial awareness and market-facing activity: messaging, website, campaign, blog, webinar, social, PR, analyst, partner comms, sales campaign, or demand generation.

Whether the support team can handle what customers will throw at them because of this specific release: troubleshooting new issues, ticket volume, escalation paths, and known-issue documentation. Distinct from Operational handoffs, which covers how work moves internally rather than support's capacity to absorb customer-facing tickets.

Who does what and how work moves internally for this release: operating model, team handoffs, governance, or internal process changes. Distinct from Support readiness, which covers the support team's capacity to handle customer-facing tickets rather than how work moves between teams.