Reinforced Product Owns Exit Criteria — Engineering Cannot Unilaterally Remove Requirements

Situation

Directed Brady and Brian that Product defines the 'what' and the 'when' while Engineering owns the 'how'. Engineering cannot unilaterally remove requirements from exit criteria. The correct response when a requirement is challenged is 'When can you deliver it?' not to debate or remove it. Forwarded the meeting recording to Bjorn and Chris Baek to align them on this prod/eng interface vision.

Reasoning

Engineering removing NVIDIA CUDA from exit criteria without Product's agreement crossed a boundary line — it usurped Product's authority over what ships. If Engineering can decide what's 'too hard' and remove it, Product loses control of the product. The correct escalation path is for Engineering to say 'we can't do X by Y date, here's when we can' — preserving Product's ability to make trade-off decisions. Sharing the recording with Bjorn and Baek is deliberate alignment — the entire leadership team needs to understand and enforce this interface.

Additional Context

Engineering unilaterally removed the NVIDIA CUDA toolkit requirement from the RLC Pro 9.6 LTS exit criteria, citing a lack of automation. Peter also directed: prioritize finishing parity gaps (Red Hat parity is the fastest path to market share), delegate operational work like image provisioning to Ryan's org to free Product for strategic work, and route delegation requests through Ryan. Email to Bjorn and Baek explicitly asked them to watch the recording 'to have clarity about how I'm trying to structure the interface between prod/eng.'

Observed Evidence

Fathom meeting summary captures Peter's explicit directive about Product owning exit criteria. The NVIDIA CUDA example is the triggering incident. Email to Bjorn and Chris Baek shows Peter proactively aligning leadership on this interface. Brady has action items: re-add exit criteria, present estimation data, route operational work through Ryan.

Matching Patterns

Confidence Breakdown

Reasoning Depth Analysis