Clarify roles, add approval workflows, and establish architectural governance

[dealako]

Summary

This PR enhances the roles-and-responsibilities framework to provide clearer guidance on team responsibilities, approval processes, and architectural governance:

Major Improvements:

• Add a comprehensive Approval Workflows section with Platform Engineering review process, expedited approval for urgent issues, and disagreement resolution procedures
• Establish Ongoing Architectural Governance with a weekly 1-hour review call for cross-product alignment and architectural decision-making
• Add concrete examples to all boundary statements for Product Owners, Engineers, and the Platform Engineering roles

Clarity Enhancements:

• Remove duplicate escalation section from Product Owners
• Clarify environment management: Engineers define specifications, platform engineering provisions infrastructure
• Update decision authority to reflect the engineer's own deployment configuration design, while Platform Engineering owns deployment approvals
• Make collaboration language more specific across all project phases (Development, Release, Post-Release)
• Rename "Product Decisions" section to "Decision Authority by Domain" for clarity

Technical Refinements:

• Update the Engineers' responsibilities to include presenting architectural changes at the weekly review call
• Change Platform Engineering infrastructure security from "recommend and implement" to "implement" to clarify authority
• Add specific items requiring architectural team review (architecture changes, technology stack, API patterns, data models, security, performance)

Key Additions:

• New "Approval Workflows" section (lines 149-203) covering:
  • Items requiring Platform Engineering review and approval
  • Items requiring architectural team review
  • Standard approval process with SLA expectations
  • Expedited approval process for urgent issues
  • Disagreement resolution procedures
• New "Ongoing Architectural Governance" section (lines 142-147) in Cross-Role Collaboration Points

Test plan

• Review document for clarity and completeness
• Verify all role boundaries include concrete examples
• Confirm no conflicting authority statements remain
• Ensure architectural review process is documented in multiple relevant sections
• Validate approval workflows are comprehensive and actionable
• Check that all collaboration phases have specific, actionable language
• Stakeholder review: Share with the engineering team for feedback
• Stakeholder review: Review with the Platform Engineering team for approval process validation
• Stakeholder review: Review with the architectural team to confirm the governance process

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Walkthrough

Reorganizes responsibilities into a unified Roles and Responsibilities framework, introduces Platform Engineering as a primary authority, consolidates Product Owner and Engineer/Developer duties and boundaries, and adds a new Operations Handbook documenting approval, ticketing, notification, and escalation workflows. (33 words)

Changes

Cohort / File(s)	Summary
Roles & responsibilities doc expectations/roles-and-responsibilities.md	Rebrands and restructures role sections: introduces Platform Engineering core responsibilities and boundaries; replaces previous Product Owner and Engineers/Developers sections with condensed Core Responsibilities and explicit Boundaries; shifts decision/escalation model to weekly architectural review and adds references to the Operations Handbook.
Operations handbook (new) expectations/operations-handbook.md	Adds operational governance: Platform Engineering review processes (standard & expedited), approval gating for pipelines/production, Jira ticket conventions and assignments, Slack notification workflow, phase-specific collaboration (planning→development→release→post-release), disagreement resolution, and auditability/accountability guidance.

Sequence Diagram(s)

(omitted)

Estimated code review effort

🎯 2 (Simple) | ⏱️ ~10 minutes

• Verify clarity and non-overlap between Platform Engineering boundaries and Product Owner/Engineer responsibilities.
• Confirm escalation flow to weekly architectural review is actionable and timeboxed.
• Check consistency of approval gating language (pipeline vs production) across both documents.
• Validate Jira/Slack templates and ticket assignment conventions for completeness.

Pre-merge checks and finishing touches

✅ Passed checks (3 passed)

Check name	Status	Explanation
Title check	✅ Passed	The title directly and accurately summarizes the main changes: clarifying roles, adding approval workflows, and establishing architectural governance frameworks.
Description check	✅ Passed	The description provides detailed, relevant context about the PR's objectives, changes, and improvements across roles, workflows, and governance—all directly related to the changeset.
Docstring Coverage	✅ Passed	No functions found in the changed files to evaluate docstring coverage. Skipping docstring coverage check.

✨ Finishing touches

🧪 Generate unit tests (beta)

• Create PR with unit tests
• Post copyable unit tests in a comment
• Commit unit tests in branch feature/roles-and-responsibilities-updates

---

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**/*.md

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All Markdown documentation must pass markdownlint validation

**/*.md: Lint Markdown files using markdownlint-cli2 (or via act with .github/workflows/markdown-lint.yml) before committing
Validate documentation by running Markdown lint locally before committing
Use ATX-style headers (# H1, ## H2) in Markdown documents
Indent lists with 2 spaces in Markdown
Keep Markdown line length under 120 characters
Allow headers with the same content at different nesting levels in Markdown
HTML tags are permitted within Markdown documents
Markdown documents do not require a top-level header

Files:

• expectations/roles-and-responsibilities.md
• expectations/operations-handbook.md

{README.md,MAINTAINERS.md,mcp/**/*.md,onboarding/**/*.md,expectations/**/*.md,prompts/**/*.md,training/**/*.md}

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• expectations/operations-handbook.md

🔇 Additional comments (2)

expectations/operations-handbook.md (1)

47-48: Define business hours for expedited approval SLA.

The expedited approval process specifies "within 4 hours during business hours" but does not define what constitutes business hours (timezone, days of week, working hours range). This creates ambiguity in SLA expectations.

Apply this diff to clarify:

- Platform Engineering provides accelerated review (target: within 4 hours during
-  business hours)
+ Platform Engineering provides accelerated review (target: within 4 hours during
+  business hours, defined as Monday–Friday, 9am–5pm Eastern Time (ET))

expectations/roles-and-responsibilities.md (1)

94-97: Verify architectural review items are consistently scoped across documents.

The items listed in the "Architectural Team Review Required" section align with those in the Operations Handbook, though the handbook provides a more granular list (including data model changes and performance considerations). This is appropriate for the two-level documentation structure, where roles-and-responsibilities.md summarizes key requirements and operations-handbook.md details the full scope.

No action required, but please verify that future updates to either section maintain alignment between summary and detailed lists.

---

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[Copilot]

Pull Request Overview

This PR refines the roles-and-responsibilities document by adding formal approval workflows, establishing architectural governance processes, and clarifying boundaries between Product Owners, Engineers, and IT/Operations teams. The changes emphasize concrete examples for role boundaries and introduce structured processes for change approvals and architectural reviews.

Key Changes:

• Adds comprehensive approval workflows section detailing IT/Operations review requirements, architectural team review processes, and expedited approval procedures for urgent issues
• Establishes weekly 1-hour architectural governance review call for cross-product alignment and architectural decision-making
• Enhances all role boundary descriptions with specific, concrete examples to eliminate ambiguity

---

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Actionable comments posted: 1

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All Markdown documentation must pass markdownlint validation

**/*.md: Lint Markdown files using markdownlint-cli2 (or via act with .github/workflows/markdown-lint.yml) before committing
Validate documentation by running Markdown lint locally before committing
Use ATX-style headers (# H1, ## H2) in Markdown documents
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Files:

• expectations/roles-and-responsibilities.md

{README.md,MAINTAINERS.md,mcp/**/*.md,onboarding/**/*.md,expectations/**/*.md,prompts/**/*.md,training/**/*.md}

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🔇 Additional comments (3)

expectations/roles-and-responsibilities.md (3)

149-203: Comprehensive Approval Workflows section aligns well with PR objectives.

The new Approval Workflows section provides clear separation of concerns: distinct pathways for IT/Operations review (CI/CD, deployment, infrastructure) and architectural team review (architecture, tech stack, APIs, data models, security, performance). The standard and expedited approval processes with SLA expectations, disagreement resolution procedures, and post-implementation verification establish a practical governance model. The structure mirrors the PR's intent to establish architectural governance and approval clarity.

---

206-214: Decision Authority by Domain clearly delineates authority boundaries across roles.

The restructured authority section aligns with PR objectives—explicitly stating that Engineers own "deployment configuration design" (line 211) while IT/Operations owns "deployment approvals" (line 214). The cross-functional conflict escalation path (line 214) provides resolution guidance. Combined with the new approval workflows, this eliminates ambiguity about who decides what.

---

1-215: No issues found – file meets all Markdown requirements.

The file already passes markdownlint validation (0 errors) and complies with the 120-character line-length limit. No action needed.

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Actionable comments posted: 2

♻️ Duplicate comments (1)

expectations/roles-and-responsibilities.md (1)

193-193: Define business hours for expedited approval SLA.

Line 193 specifies "within 4 hours during business hours" but does not define what constitutes business hours (timezone, days of week). Add explicit definition to avoid ambiguity and ensure consistent interpretation across teams.

-Platform Engineering provides accelerated review (target: within 4 hours during business hours)
+Platform Engineering provides accelerated review (target: within 4 hours during business hours, defined as Monday–Friday, 9am–5pm Eastern Time (ET))

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Validate documentation by running Markdown lint locally before committing
Use ATX-style headers (# H1, ## H2) in Markdown documents
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Files:

• expectations/roles-and-responsibilities.md

{README.md,MAINTAINERS.md,mcp/**/*.md,onboarding/**/*.md,expectations/**/*.md,prompts/**/*.md,training/**/*.md}

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expectations/roles-and-responsibilities.md

[error] 252-252: MD034/no-bare-urls Bare URL used [Context: "https://jira.example.com/brows..."]

🪛 GitHub Check: markdown-lint

expectations/roles-and-responsibilities.md

[failure] 252-252: Bare URL used [Context: "https://jira.example.com/brows..."]
expectations/roles-and-responsibilities.md:252:18 MD034/no-bare-urls Bare URL used [Context: "https://jira.example.com/brows..."]

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Actionable comments posted: 0

🧹 Nitpick comments (1)

expectations/roles-and-responsibilities.md (1)

145-145: Align tone for architectural review requirements across sections.

Line 145 uses active imperative ("Engineers present..."), but lines 166–167 use passive voice ("are presented...") for overlapping requirements. Both describe the same mandatory architectural governance process. For consistency and clarity that architectural review is required, ensure both use matching directive language.

-The following items are presented at the weekly 1-hour architectural review call
-for team alignment and approval:
+The following items must be presented at the weekly 1-hour architectural review call
+for team alignment and approval:

Also applies to: 166-167

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Validate documentation by running Markdown lint locally before committing
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Files:

• expectations/roles-and-responsibilities.md

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expectations/roles-and-responsibilities.md (2)

250-252: Markdown link formatting is correct; bare URL issue resolved.

The previously flagged bare URL at line 252 (MD034/no-bare-urls) has been properly fixed using Markdown link syntax [text](URL). No additional markdownlint violations detected in the changes.

---

193-194: Define "business hours" and "business days" in SLA commitments.

The document specifies time-bound SLAs using undefined terms:

• Line 183: "1-2 business days for standard changes"
• Line 193: "within 4 hours during business hours"

Neither "business days" nor "business hours" is defined (no timezone, days of week, or reference to organizational policy). This creates ambiguity for compliance tracking and distributed team coordination.

Resolve by either:

1. Adding inline definitions (e.g., "Monday–Friday, 9am–5pm Eastern Time (ET)")
2. Referencing an organizational policy document

Apply consistent approach to both instances.

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Actionable comments posted: 2

🧹 Nitpick comments (1)

expectations/roles-and-responsibilities.md (1)

82-82: Convert the Operations Handbook reference to a proper Markdown link.

The reference to "Operations Handbook" should be a Markdown link (not plain text) to improve documentation navigation and discoverability.

Assuming the file is located at expectations/operations-handbook.md, apply this diff:

-See the Operations Handbook for detailed approval workflows and procedures.
+See the [Operations Handbook](operations-handbook.md) for detailed approval workflows and procedures.

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Allow headers with the same content at different nesting levels in Markdown
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Files:

• expectations/roles-and-responsibilities.md

{README.md,MAINTAINERS.md,mcp/**/*.md,onboarding/**/*.md,expectations/**/*.md,prompts/**/*.md,training/**/*.md}

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expectations/roles-and-responsibilities.md (1)

39-48: Engineers responsibilities clearly define Platform Engineering collaboration points.

The Core Responsibilities section properly establishes that Engineers design deployment configurations (line 47) while Platform Engineering approves deployments—a key clarification from the PR objectives. Line 48 adds the architectural review presentation requirement, providing clear governance expectations.