Design Review: Assumptions, Experiments, and Evidence Gates
Explore how to perform evidence-based design reviews for generative AI systems by converting assumptions into falsifiable hypotheses, defining acceptance thresholds, and planning experiments. Understand when to escalate complexity based on measured gaps, ensuring security, cost, and governance readiness. This lesson helps you prepare decision-grade solution papers that withstand skeptical enterprise review boards.
The solution paper is written. Before it moves forward, it should withstand review from stakeholders responsible for identifying gaps. Design reviews for GenAI systems should be grounded in evidence. Any move beyond the minimum sufficient step in the decision ladder should be justified by a measured gap and a planned experiment rather than a preference for greater autonomy.
In the mock design review of our copilot’s solution paper, the real question is whether the paper contains enough measurable commitments, realistic feasibility claims, and explicit oversight to warrant the next spend of time, integration effort, and risk acceptance.
A skeptical enterprise review board challenges five areas, and each has to be defensible in writing:
Measurability: Can the proposed KPIs and service level objectives actually be instrumented end to end?
Feasibility realism: Do the data access, identity, and change management assumptions hold under the stated constraints?
Risk and oversight sufficiency: Are privacy, security boundaries, auditability, and human approval points where they need to be?
Exit risk: Can model, vendor, and knowledge dependencies get replaced without rewriting the business process?
Cost per successful task: Does the unit economics account for failures, retries, and human review time, not just average latency or token cost?
The paper’s sections should all support the same level of evidence-based review: the problem and decision statement, the KPI table, the feasibility table, the decision-ladder step and its criteria mapping, the scorecard, the assumptions and evidence log, and the recommendation and requested decision. Governance and oversight commitments are distributed across the option sections rather than consolidated in a single section, and the data and context requirements appear in the closing handoff, so the board should review those commitments in the sections where ...