“Productization”

I need some ‘wisdom of the crowd’ here.

I’m guessing just about ever single one of you (at least the software developer types) reading this have deployed software to a production environment at least once in your career. One of the products we’re working on is getting near to a major milestone and will start seeing wider deployments than the beta and preview deployments we’ve seen so far. I’m in charge of developing a list of different things we’ll need to do to the product to start wrapping it in a bow for wider distribution and deployment.

What sorts of things, in your opinion and experience, should I be most concerned about?  Some of things I have on my list are:  Good logging and error reporting, well-defined and practiced strategy for handling updates and patches going forward (including incremental DB schema migration), etc.

I’m also looking for any “Whatever you do, DO NOT do *this*” where *this* is some thing you tried and ended up being a terrible idea or blew up in your face.

If you comment, please keep your advice short and to the point.  Though I would encourage you, if you have a funny and/or insightful story to share, to blog and link it back to this post for me and others to read!