# Production Readiness Scorecard

**Ten questions. Five minutes. A clear read on whether your app is ready for its next hundred customers.**

Built your product fast, maybe with a lot of help from AI? Good. That is how most great products start. This scorecard tells you how much of it is ready to carry a real business, and where to look first.

## How to score

For each question, give yourself:

**2 points** if the answer is a confident yes.
**1 point** if it is partly true, or you think so but have not checked.
**0 points** if the answer is no, or you are not sure.

Add up your points at the end. The highest score is 20.

## The ten questions

**1. Secrets are out of the code.** Passwords and API keys for your database, payments and email live in environment settings, not in the code, and none of them reach the browser.

**2. Customers can only see their own data.** You have tested logging in as two different people and confirmed neither can reach the other's records, even by changing a link.

**3. Backups run on their own, and you have restored one.** Your database is backed up automatically, and you have actually restored a backup to prove it works.

**4. There is a safe place to test changes.** You have a staging copy of the app where changes are tried before customers ever see them.

**5. You find out about problems before customers do.** Error tracking and uptime alerts tell you when something breaks.

**6. The parts that touch money and personal data have tests.** Payments, signups and anything private are covered by automated tests that run before every release.

**7. Releases are boring.** Shipping a change is a repeatable process anyone on the team can run, not a nervous afternoon.

**8. You own your code and your data.** Your code lives in a repository you control, and you could export your data tomorrow if you had to.

**9. Someone besides the original builder can change it.** A new engineer could read the code and make a change without fear of breaking something unrelated.

**10. It can handle a busy day.** You know roughly how many users the app can serve at once, and what would break first if that number doubled.

## What your score means

**16 to 20: Ready to grow.** Your foundation is in good shape. Keep the habits that got you here and focus on the product.

**10 to 15: Working, but fragile.** The app does its job, and a few gaps could turn into a bad week. Fix the zeros first, starting with questions 1 to 3.

**Under 10: At risk.** The app proved the idea, which is a real win. It now needs reinforcement before it carries more customers. This is the most common score we see, and the most fixable.

## Want a second opinion?

The scorecard tells you where to look. A systems audit tells you what we would fix first and in what order. Thirty minutes with Mike and Justin, the two founders of Cause of a Kind, free, whether you work with us or not.

[Book your free systems audit](https://www.causeofakind.com/free-systems-audit)

Further reading: [What We Find When We Open the Hood on an AI Built App](https://www.causeofakind.com/blog/what-we-find-when-we-open-the-hood-on-an-ai-built-app) and [Rescue or Rebuild: How to Decide What to Do With a Vibe Coded App](https://www.causeofakind.com/blog/rescue-or-rebuild-how-to-decide-what-to-do-with-a-vibe-coded-app).


Canonical URL: https://www.causeofakind.com/production-readiness-scorecard