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System Design

Org & Leadership

What changes at staff, the platform and product boundary as a RACI with one owner per row, paved paths over mandates, owning the bill (showback, forecast alerts, brakes), and an RFC that three teams can disagree with; incident command moved to its own section.

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Staff12 min readFirst readMigrations & RolloutsRate Limiting & Cost

After this section you can

  • Draw the platform boundary as a RACI with one owner per row.
  • Choose a paved path over a mandate, and measure adoption by traffic.
  • Set forecast alerts and brakes for a shared LLM bill.
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Org & Leadership

Where the platform boundary sits, how adoption happens without a mandate, who owns the bill, and how decisions survive dissent.

Key idea

A staff answer also says what you will not work on, and why. The platform owns what every team needs identically; product teams own what differs.

The platform owns the horizontal; product teams own the vertical
PRODUCT TEAMS OWN THE VERTICAL Support bot owns its prompts owns its golden sets Search assist owns its prompts owns its quality bar Sales drafts owns its prompts owns its on-call requests AI platform: owns the horizontal gateway: auth, routing, fallbacks eval CI, prompt registry, cost tags Security sets policy, audits the gateway Finance owns the budget and showback sets policy sets budget

Blue: product teams. Teal: the platform. Amber: security and finance decisions.

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