The operating model across teams & BUs
Hub-and-spoke: centralize standards, decentralize the building.
Don't try to be personally present in every team — you'll become a bottleneck (the classic failure). Run a federated “Center of Enablement” model.
Key ideas
- 1
Hub (you + maybe 1–2 people): build the paved road (gateway, templates, eval harness, reference architecture), set standards, own governance, run the guild.
- 2
Spokes (AI champions): one upskilled, empowered engineer per team does the day-to-day. This is how you scale across BUs without cloning yourself.
- 3
A cross-BU community of practice (biweekly guild) is your main scaling lever.
- 4
Paved road > policing: make the compliant, high-quality path the EASIEST path — people follow defaults, not documents.
- 5
Operating principle: centralize the standards and platform; decentralize the building.
Hub-and-spoke (Center of Enablement)
A small hub builds and owns the paved road and standards; embedded AI champions in each team build day-to-day and multiply your reach. A biweekly guild shares patterns, demos and decisions across BUs.
Why this beats centralizing everything
- Avoids the #1 failure mode: becoming the bottleneck on every AI feature.
- Champions give you eyes, hands and trust inside teams you don't manage.
- Defaults (paved road) drive behavior far more reliably than policy documents.
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Do the work
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What's the core operating principle of the model?
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