Leadership Isn't a Style - It's an MLOps Problem
The PagerDuty alert is a jolt of pure adrenaline. One minute you’re in a roadmap meeting, the next you’re staring at a Grafana dashboard bleeding red. A critical model is returning garbage predictions, and your team’s Slack channel explodes into a frantic cacophony of questions, stack traces, and panicked @-mentions.
Every eye turns to you.
In that instant, two leadership playbooks flash through your mind. The first is the Wartime General: take command, centralize control, make the call, and fix it now. The second is the Peacetime Architect: be deliberate, gather data, understand the blast radius, don't make it worse.
The conventional wisdom tells us to pick one. To define our 'style.' But that's a false choice, an outdated binary that fails to capture the dynamic, cyclical nature of our work.
Now this isn’t a personality test. It’s a systems problem. For those of us in the world of AI and data, there's a more powerful model:
The MLOps Lifecycle.
Your team is an end-to-end system for producing value. Your job, as the Head of MLOps for that system, is to expertly guide it through its two most critical phases: Model Development and Deployment & Inference.
The Two Phases of Leadership
Every great MLOps lifecycle has two core, interdependent phases. A leader’s failure to distinguish between them - or getting stuck in one - is the single biggest reason why talented teams underperform.
Phase 1: Model Development
This is the strategic, long-term work of building a powerful and robust "model" of how your team operates. It’s the investment in your future, but it comes with a hidden danger.
The Leader's Focus is on Culture and Capability. You are an R&D lead, but your most important research project is your team's culture. Your primary job is to create psychological safety - an environment where smart risks are celebrated. You obsess over mentorship, create clear career paths, and invest in the tooling that makes your team's daily work joyful and efficient.
The Team's Experience is Empowerment. This is when engineers feel a deep sense of ownership and autonomy. But a team that stays in this mode for too long risks a critical failure: overfitting. They become perfectly tuned to a stable, predictable environment, losing the resilience to handle the messy, unpredictable data of a real-world crisis.
Phase 2: Deployment & Inference
This is the high-stakes, real-time work of executing with the model you have, right now. This isn't just a test; it's your most valuable validation set.
The Leader's Focus is on Clarity and Command. You are the incident commander. Your job is to absorb the chaos and radiate calm, decisive clarity. You centralize command, shield your engineers from stakeholder panic, and enforce a singular objective.
The Team's Experience is Focused Urgency. The ambiguity of peacetime is gone, replaced by a crystal-clear mission. The crisis provides the injection of chaotic, real-world data that reveals every hidden flaw in your processes and assumptions, stress-testing your "model" against reality.
The most critical insight is that these phases are a virtuous cycle. The capabilities built during "Development" are tested during "Inference," and the learnings from that test are the fuel for the next round of development.
How to Switch Modes
Knowing the phases is one thing. The true mark of a great leader is having the courage and skill to transition the entire team from one mode to the other.
First, You Read the Signals
Your job is to be the most sensitive monitoring tool for the business. You're constantly scanning for the events that demand a shift.
A competitor ships a killer feature that blindsides you. The market has declared war. It's time to switch to Inference mode.
You've just survived a brutal on-call week. The system is stable. The immediate threat is over. It's time to switch to Development mode.
Team velocity is slowly degrading and the same preventable bugs are reappearing. That’s a signal of foundational drift. It's time to switch to Development mode.
The team is getting bogged down in endless architectural debates on a feature that needs to ship this quarter. They need a tie-breaker. It’s time to switch to Inference mode.
Then, You Run the Play
Once you've made the diagnosis, you execute a specific runbook. Your team doesn't just hear that the priority has changed; they see and feel it in their daily work.
The "Inference" Runbook - Forging a Culture of Focused Urgency When a crisis hits, you don't just talk about urgency; your actions architect the response.
You Forge a High-Trust Unit. You launch a war room, pulling in only the essential personnel. This forges a temporary, elite unit and signals that normal rules are suspended in favor of a singular mission.
You Build a Wall of Psychological Safety. You become the firewall, absorbing all external communication. This is a powerful act of servant leadership that builds immense trust and shields your team from distraction.
You Provide Unmistakable Clarity. You pause everything else. This provides the air cover your team needs to act decisively, removing the cognitive load of competing priorities.
The "Development" Runbook - Forging a Culture of Empowerment Now, the fire is out. You switch the team back to a mode of learning with equal conviction.
You Make Learning the Top Priority. You schedule a blameless post-mortem immediately. This is your most powerful cultural ritual, signaling that failure is not a crime, but a priceless source of data.
You Put Your Capacity Where Your Values Are. You weaponize the backlog, making the post-mortem action items the top priority. This tangible investment proves that learning is not just talk.
You Invest in Your Team's Mindshare. You clear the decks, canceling non-essential meetings to create space for deep work. This action signals that you trust them and that strategic thinking is a celebrated part of the job.
This clarity is everything. Your actions tell the team whether they will be rewarded for thoroughness or for speed.
The Bottomline
Stop asking if you're a "Wartime" or a "Peacetime" leader. The question is obsolete. It frames you as a static tool when, in fact, you are the systems architect for your team’s culture and capabilities.
The real job of a leader is to manage this cycle with intent. Your role is to guide the team through deliberate periods of focused development, and then have the courage to expose that team to the harsh, clarifying feedback of a real-world crisis.
An average leader fears a crisis. A great leader understands its true purpose: it is the feedback loop that saves you from the slow death of irrelevance.
They harness the chaos of "Inference" to identify every flaw, and they use the calm of "Development" to build a stronger, more adaptable team for the next challenge.
So, here's my question to you:
Is your team currently in a cycle of learning, or a cycle of execution? And are you confident it's the right one for what's coming next?