Governance is a euphemism for "who gets to say no, and how fast." A governance doc that takes two weeks to approve a new tool will not survive contact with a team that ships weekly. The art is in distinguishing the decisions that need scrutiny from the ones that need speed.
Three decision tiers
- Local — team can decide and ship. New tool added to an internal-only agent. New prompt change. Most things live here.
- Platform — needs a platform-team review. Touching the model gateway, the eval harness, the secret store, anything that affects more than one team.
- Exec / legal — needs sign-off from outside engineering. New model provider, new data type entering the model, anything customer-facing with significant blast radius.
Default to small loops
For each tier, write down the longest the decision should take. "Local: same day. Platform: 3 business days. Exec: 1 week." If you can't hit those, the loop is too long and somebody is going to ship around the process. Write the SLA down and review it monthly.
Knowledge check
0/1 answered1. A team adds a new system prompt for an internal-only triage agent. Which tier of approval?
Discussion
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