1 min lesson
Align by making incentives visible
Compare two rows from "Align by making incentives visible", then say when each one fits.
Step 1 of 2
Align by making incentives visiblefind the overlap
Cross-functional friction is rarely about who's right. It's about two people optimizing different things and not seeing it. The ML lead wants model quality and experiment velocity; Finance wants predictable COGS; Infra wants reliability and headroom. Your job is to surface those tensions on paper and find the move that advances more than one of them.
- Partner
- ML / Research
- What they optimize
- Model quality, experiment velocity, freedom to burn compute
- The shared win to find
- Model routing that cuts cost on easy queries and frees GPU budget for experiments
- Partner
- Finance
- What they optimize
- Predictable, attributable COGS; gross-margin story
- The shared win to find
- Showback that gives them clean unit economics and gives ML a fair budget defense
- Partner
- Infrastructure
- What they optimize
- Reliability, utilization, capacity headroom
- The shared win to find
- Capacity plan that raises utilization and protects burst headroom they care about
| Partner | What they optimize | The shared win to find |
|---|---|---|
| ML / Research | Model quality, experiment velocity, freedom to burn compute | Model routing that cuts cost on easy queries and frees GPU budget for experiments |
| Finance | Predictable, attributable COGS; gross-margin story | Showback that gives them clean unit economics and gives ML a fair budget defense |
| Infrastructure | Reliability, utilization, capacity headroom | Capacity plan that raises utilization and protects burst headroom they care about |
When you can state the other side's incentive better than they can, they trust that your proposal accounts for it.