Decision check

Does this model change need an assessment?

Use the decision, customer impact, uncertainty, and cost of being wrong to choose the right level of evidence.

Audience: Product and engineering leaders deciding whether to approve evaluation work.
Question: Is this change important or uncertain enough to justify a controlled comparison?

Start with the decision, not the model release

A provider announcement is not a business question. Name the action your team is considering and the deadline that makes the answer useful.

01
Write the choice as baseline versus candidate.
02
Name the owner who can act on the recommendation.
03
State what customer or operational outcome could change.
04
Set the latest useful decision date.

Assess when the cost of guessing is material

A controlled assessment is useful when a wrong change could reduce answer quality, break a policy, slow a critical path, increase provider spend, or create difficult rollback work.

01
List the two most serious plausible regressions.
02
Identify any requirement that would block the change by itself.
03
Estimate whether a bad decision is reversible in hours, days, or longer.

Use a lighter check for low-consequence changes

A full assessment may be unnecessary for an internal experiment with no customer exposure, no meaningful provider-cost change, and an immediate rollback. Keep a small smoke test and record why deeper work was not needed.

Worked example

Example: a cheaper model for support drafts

The candidate could reduce spend, but a wrong refund statement would create customer and policy risk. That combination—meaningful upside plus a blocking failure mode—supports a focused assessment.