Engineering, production, governance, cost, communication · insight-0300

Give every production model a named owner, a runbook and a support path

Situation
A model alert fires at night, and the person who built it left the company months ago.
Action
Register an owning team and on-call rotation per model, write a runbook covering alerts, rollback, fallback and stakeholders, and test it by having someone other than the author follow it.
Reason
Operational ownership and documented procedures reduce time to recover and dependence on individuals.
Boundary
Any model whose failure affects customers, money or compliance.

Symptom or risk

Nobody knows what the alert means, how to roll back or whom to inform, so a small issue becomes a long incident.

Short-lived experiments can have lighter ownership if they switch off automatically.

On-call costs people's time; low-severity models can use business-hours support.

Runbooks that describe architecture but not what to do.