You Need A Marketing Pre-Flight Checklist

“Move fast and break things,” said the pilot.

A pilot of a plane you’ll never willingly step on.

Yet somehow this Silicon Valley mantra became gospel for marketing teams managing million-dollar budgets and brand reputations.

Here’s the thing: pilots don’t use checklists because they’re paranoid. They use them because they’re pros. Even after 20,000 flight hours, even on routine trips, even when they’re running late—hell, especially then.

Marketing feels creative and spontaneous, and in many ways, it is. But a lot of its execution is engineering. You’re building systems that need to work under load, with money on the line and your reputation at stake.

The difference between an amateur and a pro marketer isn’t talent. It’s process and rigor.

The good news: you can move fast without breaking things. Your speed can come from preparation, not shortcuts.

You wouldn’t fly straight into a thunderstorm. So don’t launch into the wrong market.

Before any campaign goes live, you need to understand your base rate of success. What does a typical conversion rate look like in your industry? What’s it going to cost to acquire a customer? How will you know you’ve succeeded, and how long’s it going to take to get there?

These are the questions you need to ask yourself.

In fact, there have even been a couple of clients I have encouraged to stop spending for a little while because our limited test runs showed their offers weren’t attracting the right people. Going back to R&D at that point might sound like a failure, but it’s far less of a failure to stop early than to sink tens of thousands into product launches that have low odds of success.

This is where market fit meets offer validation. You can execute flawlessly and still fail if you’re trying to sell snow shovels in Phoenix. Part of your preflight checklist needs to be an honest assessment: are the conditions right for what we’re trying to do here?

This doesn’t mean never take risks—it means clearly define your risks and decide if you want to take them before you take them.

And it’s here that it helps to…

Every marketing campaign needs to start with some kind of testable idea. Write down what you think will happen and how you’re going to test your assumptions.

When the campaign ends, compare what happened with what you thought would happen. Do this consistently, and you’ll build institutional knowledge instead of starting from scratch.

You don’t need fancy software to do this. Just start keeping good notes in the best way you can.

In marketing, you have to balance exploring (trying new things) with exploiting (doubling down on what works). Market signals like increasing inbound interest, improving conversion rates over time, or increased revenue or sales are often signs that you’re on the right track.

But in the heat of the moment, it’s easy to get excited over progress that isn’t sufficient. So determine, in advance, what your green lights are.

And speaking of green lights, that brings me to the next part…

In aviation, V1 is the speed at which a takeoff can no longer be stopped. By the time you pass V1, attempting to stop is more dangerous than continuing.

For marketers, it’s tempting to think that there are no V1 moments. Everything can be paused or removed, right?

Not exactly. Before you reach V1, changes are cheap, private, and reversible. Change copy until your heart is content, or stop the whole thing with no consequences other than embarrassment.

But once you reach V1? Different story.

If you have an ad go viral for the wrong reasons, or you spend $20,000 on podcast ads and the landing page 404s? That’s expensive, public, and risky.

A single tracking pixel failure can cost six figures in wasted spend if you’re not careful. Websites can get hugged to death by massive traffic loads that could have been predicted. And a single picture taken from Getty Images without a license can result in some very scary letters in the mail.

The reason we skip preflight checks isn’t stupidity. It’s just time pressure and a dash of overconfidence.

“It’s a simple campaign.”

“We’ve done this before.”

“Let’s move fast and fix problems as they come up.”

That last one is killer. In software, you can patch bugs. But in marketing, you’re spending real money to reach real people with a real brand reputation on the line. And some breaks can’t be fixed.

I’ve spoken plenty about why you need a preflight checklist, so it’s here that I’d like to share the one I use:

That’s the million-dollar question right there, because this can feel like a lot if you try to do it all at once.

So here’s my advice:

Keep it as simple as possible. My checklist above is not the one I use every day. Narrow it down to 5-7 items for daily use and use the detailed expanded version for major launches. It’s far better to use a shortened checklist regularly than a long checklist rarely.

Make it a habit. Build checks and balances into your project workflow where you can. Assign clear ownership and make it impossible to launch without a sign-off.

Educate stakeholders. Help clients understand why professional failsafes need to exist. Frame it as protecting their investment, not something that is there to slow them down. And don’t be afraid to tell a horror story of marketing gone wrong to make your point. The risks you’re trying to ward off are real and sometimes emotional stories are the ones needed to make the point stick.

Modify your checklist as you learn. Failure and success might both change your checklist, so don’t be shy about changing what goes on there.

Finally, build redundancy into your processes. Murphy’s Law exists for a reason, and that’s because single points of failure—count on it—will one day fail. And often at the worst moment, because it’s more fun that way.

So have multiple tracking methods for conversions. Pull in sales from multiple channels in case one flatlines. You get the idea.

Amateur marketing breaks things. Professional marketing prevents breaks.

The difference isn’t talent and it’s not creativity. It’s simply systems and discipline. The marketers who scale effectively are not the ones with the best ideas, but the ones who execute cleanly and learn systematically.

When you know your infrastructure won't fail under pressure, you can focus on creating campaigns that succeed instead of hoping they don't break. And that’s really what checklists give you: not so much constraints, but confidence. They let you move fast because you've already thought through what could go wrong.

The pilots are right. Checklists work like a charm.

Let’s take a note from them.