Stakeholders:
- Product Manager (owner of product goals & prioritization)
- Data Scientists (model research & validation)
- Software Engineers / MLOps (deployment, infra, monitoring)
- Data Engineers (pipelines, feature stores)
- QA / Security / Compliance (testing, privacy)
- Business / Customer Ops (metrics & adoption)
- Engineering Manager / Exec Sponsor (resourcing, strategic decisions)
Communication cadence:
- Project kickoff (1×): align goals, success metrics, timeline, RACI.
- Weekly tactical sync (30–60m): blockers, short-term tasks (attendees: ML eng, DS, DE, SRE, PM).
- Biweekly steering (30m): progress vs roadmap, model metrics, A/B test outcomes (attendees: PM, Eng Manager, key reps).
- Daily standup (15m, optional) for core build team.
- Monthly executive report: one-page summary of impact, risks, decisions required.
Dashboards & reports:
- Live dashboard (Grafana/Looker): model performance (accuracy, AUC), business KPIs, latency, throughput, data drift, feature distribution, infra costs, alert counts.
- Automated daily email: top 3 signals (health ok/warning/critical), recent deployments, test results.
- Post-mortem & release notes after incidents/major releases.
Escalation paths & decision flow:
- Tier 0: Engineer discovers issue → notify on-call SRE/ML Ops; auto-alerts trigger rollback if critical.
- Tier 1: Tech lead evaluates; if resource/architecture change needed, escalate to PM and Eng Manager.
- Tier 2: If strategic trade-off, compliance or >2-week delay or >5% business KPI impact → escalate to Exec Sponsor with one-page decision memo and recommended options.
- Use RACI for approvals (e.g., PM approves product changes; Eng Manager approves resourcing; Exec approves scope shifts).
Surfacing risks & exec attention:
- Define thresholds (e.g., drift > X, latency > Y ms, business metric drop > Z%) that automatically surface as “decision required.”
- Weekly risk register updated in shared doc with likelihood, impact, mitigation, owner.
- For executive attention: send concise “Decision Memo” (context, options, recommendation, consequences, ask) and request 24–72h response window depending on urgency.
- Hold a monthly 15–30m exec sync when any open high/critical risks exist.
Example: if A/B test shows 6% revenue drop and drift > threshold, an automated alert appears on dashboard, PSR (problem summary report) is created, tech lead runs rollback and PM prepares decision memo for execs within 24 hours.
This structure balances frequent tactical alignment, transparent metrics, clear escalation, and concise executive decision-making while keeping owners accountable.
