Domain 6: Stakeholder Communication & Lifecycle Management

Cheat sheet for Stakeholder & Lifecycle: discovery, ADRs, SLAs, docs, phase ownership.

Structured discovery (6.1)

Goals, constraints, data, owners, and measurable metrics before any stack. Interview owners and operators; capture NFRs early; gate procurement on exit criteria.

No day-one vector DB without problem framing
Turn findings into testable requirements
Document non-goals that bound scope

Communicate decisions (6.2)

Show ≥2 viable alternatives with costs/risks
Separate recommendation from rejected options
ADR: context, decision, consequences, rejects
Tie trade-offs to quality / latency / cost / risk

Feedback & SLAs (6.3)

Publish stakeholder-agreed SLAs
Cadence reviews: quality, cost, SLA adherence
Escalate expectation drift early with evidence
Feed actions into backlog and evals — not emojis alone

Document architectures (6.4)

Diagrams + rationale + interface contracts + named ownership + failure runbooks. Pretty diagrams alone fail.

Tool/API/output contracts versioned
Build / ops / eval owners named
Runbooks for empty retrieval, tool 5xx, canary drops

Lifecycle phases (6.5)

Discovery → design → handoff → monitoring → iteration
Exit criteria per phase (explicit go/no-go)
Handoff transfers accepted ops/eval ownership
Do not vanish after the ADR — plan iteration intake