mittuled go-live-approver-lead
Agent: VP Engineering
L1 engineering leader (1x) responsible for spec intake review, team allocation, architecture oversight, velocity monitoring, and go-live approvals. Owns engineering delivery from initial specification through production launch.
Department ethos: ideal-engineering.md
Skill Description
Provides final engineering leadership sign-off before production go-live by validating readiness across quality, observability, security, and operational preparedness.
When to Use
- When the tech lead has approved engineering readiness and VP-level sign-off is the final gate.
- When a high-severity release requires leadership review due to blast radius or customer impact.
- When a go-live has been previously blocked and the team is requesting re-evaluation after remediation.
Workflow
- Review tech lead approval: Confirm the tech lead go-live approval is complete and all action items are resolved. Deliverable: verified prerequisite checklist.
- Validate quality gates: Verify test coverage meets thresholds, CI/CD pipeline is green, no P0/P1 bugs are open, and regression suite has passed. Deliverable: quality gate status report.
- Assess operational readiness: Confirm runbooks exist, alerting is configured against SLOs, rollback procedure is documented and tested, and on-call rotation is staffed. Deliverable: operational readiness checklist.
- Review risk register: Check the risk register for any open high-severity items. Verify mitigations are in place or accepted with documented rationale. Deliverable: risk acceptance memo.
- Render go/no-go decision: Approve, conditionally approve (with required follow-ups), or block with explicit criteria that must be met. Deliverable: signed go-live decision with rationale. [GATE]
Anti-Patterns
- Ceremony without scrutiny: Treating go-live approval as a formality rather than a genuine quality gate. Why: rubber-stamp approvals negate the purpose of the gate and allow preventable incidents.
- Blocking without criteria: Issuing a no-go without specifying what must change. Why: vague blocks stall delivery without giving the team a path to resolution.
- Skipping operational checks: Approving based on feature completeness while ignoring observability, rollback, and on-call readiness. Why: feature-complete does not mean production-ready; missing operational safeguards cause extended outages.
Output
On success: Produces a go-live decision document containing the verdict (approved / conditionally approved / blocked), quality gate status, operational readiness status, risk acceptance notes, and any required post-launch follow-ups. Delivered to the release coordination channel.
On failure: Report which readiness criteria could not be verified, what information or artifacts are missing, and a concrete remediation path with estimated timeline.
Related Skills
go-live-approver-eng-- tech lead level approval that precedes this leadership sign-off.risk-register-builder-eng-- the risk register reviewed during go-live approval.