Production Excellence

Production Excellence

A thin composition bundle that assembles cross-domain production evidence into a defensible launch or operational decision. It owns the acceptance and handoff layer — the gate model that reads evidence from specialist skills and produces go / no-go / defer / exception / escalation outcomes with accountable owners. It does not own any specialist's runbook.

When to load this

Load when:

• A service or change is approaching a launch decision and evidence from multiple production domains must be assembled.
• You need a structured gate model (go/no-go/defer/exception/escalation) with conditions, evidence, and accountable owners.
• Cross-domain evidence (readiness, migration, recovery, capacity/cost, incident history) must be combined into one operational handoff record.
• A launch or change needs a post-launch learning path routed to incident-learning and product-lifecycle-learning.
• You are coordinating a production change across SRE, release, platform, security, data, and QA specialists and need a single acceptance contract.

When not to use

Do not load this bundle for:

• Incident command or SLO operations — those are owned by site-reliability-engineering.
• Release-pipeline mechanics, versioning, or deployment strategies — those are owned by release-engineering.
• Platform architecture or internal-developer-platform design — those are owned by platform-engineering.
• Threat modeling, security review procedure, or vulnerability assessment — those are owned by secure-software-engineering.
• Data-pipeline design, ETL, or storage architecture — those are owned by data-engineering.
• Test-strategy design, regression-suite management, or test-automation framework design — those are owned by qa-methodology.
• A generic checklist detached from service ownership, risk, evidence, and verification — every gate in this bundle requires a named service owner, assessed risk, verified evidence, and a declaration of the verification boundary. A bare checklist is never a valid outcome.

This bundle composes specialists. It never replaces them and never re-derives their methods. If the task is wholly within one specialist's domain, load that specialist directly.

Readiness routing table

The bundle routes each production concern to the specialist that owns it. The bundle itself owns only the acceptance and handoff layer — the cross-domain assembly and the gate decision.

Primary production-domain routes

Supporting specialist routes

Cross-domain entry evidence

Before the gate model runs, entry evidence must exist from every applicable domain. The bundle does not gather this evidence — it requires it. The complete evidence packet specification is in references/evidence-packet.md.

Summary:

• Every evidence domain (readiness, migration, recovery, capacity/cost, incident-learning) has a named source or an explicit gap with an owner and due date.
• The packet is usable for both new services and changes to existing systems — domains irrelevant to the change are explicitly marked "not applicable" with a reason.
• Missing evidence is never silently omitted. Every gap is recorded.

Gate and exception model

The gate model produces exactly one of five outcomes for every production change. Full definitions, conditions, and evidence requirements are in references/gates.md.

Every outcome is anchored to service ownership, risk, evidence, and verification. No gate passes on a bare checklist. Each outcome names the accountable owner and records the evidence that supports it.

Operational handoff and post-launch learning

After a gate outcome is reached, the operational handoff record (references/handoff-record.md) is populated.

Post-launch learning paths

Launch outcomes and post-launch observations feed two learning routes:

1. Incident learning — post-launch incidents (SLO degradations, unexpected failures, capacity breaches) are routed to incident-learning. The handoff record provides the launch context; the incident-learning skill's verified-closure requirement ensures follow-up items are tracked to completion.

2. Lifecycle learning — expected outcomes recorded in the handoff (SLO targets, capacity assumptions, cost projections) are routed to product-lifecycle-learning for expected-vs-observed comparison at the handoff's review cadence. The lifecycle-learning skill's continue/improve/harvest/pivot/pause/retire decisions are informed by the gap between predicted and observed production behavior.

The handoff record is populated for every outcome — not only Go. No-go, Defer, Exception, and Escalation each produce a handoff record with the blocking condition, the follow-up path, and the accountable owner.

Loading and nested-skill behavior

This bundle is the discoverable entry point. It does not contain nested sub-skills under a skills/ directory. All routed skills are top-level catalog skills referenced via relative markdown links. Harnesses that support progressive disclosure will discover this bundle through its SKILL.md frontmatter and load the referenced specialists on trigger.

See AGENTS.md for agent-specific loading notes.

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