Chas6d Playbook: Six Disciplines That Turn Strategy Into Shipped Outcomes

Chas6d isn’t a product—it’s a way of working. Think of it as six disciplines that align leaders, builders, and operators so your roadmap becomes shipped, measurable outcomes. This playbook gives you simple definitions, checklists, examples, and KPIs you can adopt in a week and scale over a quarter.

What Is Chas6d?

Chas6d is a six-discipline operating model for building adaptive, secure, measurable products. It’s intentionally vendor-neutral so you can apply it to any stack—from a small SaaS to a multi-cloud platform. The goal is consistent: ship faster, with less risk, and prove impact.

The Six Disciplines (C-H-A-S-D-D)

Use this opinionated, easy-to-teach mapping. Rename anything to match your org’s language.

1) Context (shared direction)

• One-pager for the initiative: problem, audience, desired behavior change, success metric.
• Outcomes over output: features only exist to move a metric.
• Decision log for trade-offs (date, owner, why).

2) Harmony (structures that fit together)

• Service map with owners; APIs documented at the boundary.
• Orchestration or choreography chosen consciously; avoid blends without rules.
• Data contracts with versioning; breaking changes require RFCs.

3) Adaptation (learning in production)

• Feature flags for every risky change; progressive rollout rules.
• Experiment playbook: hypothesis → guardrail metrics → stop/ship criteria.
• Continuous delivery with automated checks, not heroics.

4) Security (safety as default)

• Identity-first access, least privilege, short-lived tokens.
• Secrets manager; rotation policy enforced by CI.
• SBOM + dependency scanning; high-severity issues block release.

5) Data & Observability (see what’s true)

• Event schemas with tests; lineage documented.
• Golden dashboards: latency, error rate, throughput, saturation.
• Tracing at key user journeys; alerts with playbooks, not noise.

6) Delivery (the runtime reality)

• Environments defined as code; reproducible dev → prod path.
• Autoscaling + cost guardrails; SLOs per critical path.
• Rollback is a button, not a meeting.

Quick-Start: 7-Day Activation Plan

Spin up chas6d in one week, then iterate.

1. Day 1 — Context: Publish the one-pager and pick one primary metric.
2. Day 2 — Harmony: Draw a current-state service map; mark owners and contracts.
3. Day 3 — Adaptation: Add a feature-flag service; choose a small change to gate.
4. Day 4 — Security: Enforce SSO; move secrets into a manager; set a rotation interval.
5. Day 5 — Data: Define an event schema; add tests in CI; wire baseline tracing.
6. Day 6 — Delivery: Write IaC for the demo path; define SLOs and a rollback rule.
7. Day 7 — Demo: Ship a tiny vertical slice behind a flag; review metrics and decisions.

Examples: E-commerce, Healthcare, Fintech

E-commerce: “Personalized Collections”

• Context: Increase add-to-cart by 5% on mobile.
• Harmony: Catalog API → Recommendation API → UI; explicit contracts.
• Adaptation: New layout behind flag for 10% traffic; A/B with guardrails.
• Security: Rotate API keys; block deploy on critical vulns.
• Data: Click and add-to-cart events validated; trace the full path.
• Delivery: Canary release; auto-rollback if p95 latency or error rate breaches SLO.

Healthcare: “Tele-visit Reliability”

• Context: Target 99.9% successful video starts.
• Harmony: Clear boundary between auth, media, and notifications services.
• Adaptation: Progressive codec tweaks via flags, not big-bang updates.
• Security: PHI encrypted end-to-end; audit logs reviewed weekly.
• Data: Emit start/fail reasons; alert on rising jitter and drop rates.
• Delivery: Runbooks for regional failover; rehearsed monthly.

Fintech: “Fraud Step-Up”

• Context: Reduce fraud losses by 15% without hurting conversion.
• Harmony: Transaction gateway → scoring service → decision API.
• Adaptation: Roll out model v2 to 5% of traffic with guardrails on approval rate.
• Security: Tokenize PII; least-privilege roles for model access.
• Data: Versioned features; lineage from raw events to features to scores.
• Delivery: Blue/green deploy; instant rollback if false positives spike.

KPIs & Scorecard

Discipline	Starter KPI	Healthy Target
Context	% initiatives with one-pager	≥ 95%
Harmony	Services with owner & contract	≥ 90%
Adaptation	Lead time for change	≤ 24h
Security	SBOM pass rate / secrets rotated	≥ 95% / 100%
Data	Events with schema tests	≥ 90%
Delivery	Change failure rate / MTTD	≤ 10% / ≤ 5 min

Antipatterns & How to Fix Them

• “Ship first, measure later.” Fix: require a metric and guardrail before work starts.
• “Shadow ownership.” Fix: publish owner + escalation on every service contract.
• “Security as a gate at the end.” Fix: make SBOM and secret checks part of CI, not a meeting.
• “Everything all at once.” Fix: one vertical slice behind a flag; earn the right to add more.
• “Alert fatigue.” Fix: attach every alert to a runbook and an owner; delete the rest.

FAQs

Is chas6d only for big companies?
No. The six disciplines scale down to a single team and up to platform orgs.

Do we need ML to benefit from chas6d?
Not at all. Start with rules and experiments; add ML when it clearly improves outcomes.

How soon can we see results?
In a week if you follow the 7-day activation plan; deeper gains arrive as KPIs become habits.

What tools do we need?
Any. The model is vendor-neutral—use your preferred flags, CI/CD, observability, and cloud.