Evo Launch — a transparent project launch
A launch roadmap where the client can see which step we're on at any moment, and answers questions right there.
- The client checks launch status themselves and stops asking for updates
- Questionnaires and answers travel both ways: the team asks, the client answers on the site
- The manager keeps working in an ordinary spreadsheet — no new tool to learn
The problem
A client launch is a month of correspondence across three channels where nobody remembers whose move it is. I wanted one address to point people at — and one that didn't force the team to adopt a new system.
How it works
The source of truth is the ordinary Google spreadsheet the manager already maintains; the site reads it directly at load time. Answers from client and team travel back into the sheet through a script with two separate passes — client and team hold different rights. There is no backend and no database at all: nothing to fall over, nothing to administer.
The hard part
The core difficulty was reading someone else's spreadsheet from a browser with no server: the direct request runs into the domain policy. The way through was an alternate output format that serves the data with the right headers. The second was splitting rights without a backend — two distinct write passes proved a sufficient boundary for this class of task.
Evidence
- 237 automated tests over the data parsing and display rules
- The first real client launch is being run in this system
- The two-way exchange verified round-trip: team question → client answer → spreadsheet