Most governance frameworks are written for Fortune 500 boards. They're not wrong, they're just wrongly scoped for a ten-person team shipping weekly. What lean teams need isn't a framework — it's a short, honest conversation, held on a cadence.
Five questions, every quarter
- 1What models are touching customer data, and who signed off?
- 2Where are we depending on a single provider?
- 3What would "getting it wrong" cost us, and who'd notice first?
- 4What's the exit plan from every AI dependency?
- 5Who outside engineering is empowered to say stop?
A policy no one reads is indistinguishable from no policy.
Keep the answers in the same document every quarter. You'll watch the answers evolve, and that evolution is the real artifact — far more useful than a static charter.
The simplest tool is a shared doc
Set a recurring 45-minute meeting. One person types. Five questions, five answers, fifteen minutes of discussion on whichever answer surprised someone. That's the entire governance apparatus. Keep the doc in a place everyone can find — the same folder as your OKRs is fine.
The discipline isn't in the framework. It's in showing up.
Ziad Adel runs ScaleFlow, where he helps teams replace busy work with well designed systems. He writes here about what he's learning, usually the night after shipping it.
