What We Learned Shipping 40+ Applied Research Projects

Across 40+ applied research projects, the same patterns keep separating a demo from a deployed system.

Patterns across industries

The domains change; the failure modes rarely do. Data drift, brittle integrations, and undefined ownership after handover show up on almost every project.

The habits that carry a project

• Write the evaluation before the model
• Deploy a thin slice early, on real hardware
• Name an owner for the system after go-live
• Keep a rollback that a non-author can run

The prototype proves it can work. The deployment proves it keeps working.