What is shipping, really

Shipping is a social construct within a company. Concretely, that means that a project is shipped when the important people at your company believe it is shipped.

It's not when it's deployed, it's when it's acknowledged by leadership and socially celebrated.

If you deploy your system, but your manager or VP or CEO is very unhappy with it, you did not ship. (Maybe you shipped something, but you didn’t ship the actual project.)
If you ship something users hate and makes no money, but your leadership team is happy, you still shipped.

The role of the tech lead when shipping

First, you have to get clear on what the company is looking to get out of the project.

Shipping should be the priority of someone, usually the tech lead.

it’s really important that one person on the project has an end-to-end understanding of the whole thing: how it hangs together technically, and what product or business purpose it serves

For the teams that don't have a tech lead:

projects live and die based on whether an engineer steps up into this role of their own accord.

Competence and confidence

you have the most end-to-end context on the project, which means you should be the least scared of scary changes.

Gaining trust

they will be trusting you for estimates, to answer technical questions, and to anticipate technical problems. Maintaining that trust should be your top priority. If they don’t have faith in your ability to do the job and to keep them informed, you will not ship.

your manager will be much happier going to their manager about it if they can say something like “our options are to delay four days, or ship tomorrow by sacrificing X” — even if sacrificing X is a non-starter.

Communication

Communicate professionally and concisely, and don’t make them chase you for updates: post a daily or weekly thread somewhere
It is much, much more important to do these things than for the project to ship with zero bugs on the exact deadline.

• If a project has to be delayed for technical reasons, in my experience you will not suffer consequences so long as you communicate it clearly, confidently (and ideally with some warning).