The onboarding checklist, and why steps do not tick themselves

Getting live is five steps. Each one is checked by the product rather than reported by a person.

The five

1. Set your brand colour. The palette is generated and every text and background pairing is measured before it can be saved.
2. Authenticate your sending domain. Mail leaves under your domain, and the check confirms your records are published and the certificate is ready before anything moves.
3. Bring your records in. Every row of your export is accounted for: landed, rejected with a reason, or a duplicate we did not double.
4. Check you can reach us. Raise one ticket through the support widget, so the first time you use that path is not the day you need it.
5. Review what your clients are told about automated tools. The text is generated from the tools you have switched on.

Why a step cannot be ticked by hand

There is no override. The engine that marks a step done runs the step's check first and refuses when it fails, and there is no second way in: no force option, no reason field, no supervisor approval that skips it.

That is not caution about your competence. It is about what happens to every checklist that has an override in it. Within a quarter it becomes a list of ticks, because the fastest way past a step that is misbehaving on a Friday is the override, and the tick that results is indistinguishable from a real one.

What proves it worked

Try to mark a step done before you have completed it. You get the reason the check failed, with the measurement or the missing record named. You do not get a tick.

What each step blocks

Steps 1 and 5 block opening the client portal, because a portal below contrast or without its required disclosure should not be shown to a client. Step 2 blocks outbound mail leaving under your domain. Step 3 blocks the tenant being marked live, because nobody should go live on data whose row count was never reconciled.

Step 4 blocks nothing. It is on the list anyway.

If a step will not pass

The failure names the thing rather than the step. A palette failure names the pairing and the number it measured. A domain failure names the record that was not found. An import failure names the count that did not reconcile. Take the named thing to the article for that step, and if it still will not pass, raise a ticket and quote the message.