Who owns the eval harness, the CPO or the CTO?

THE SHORT ANSWER

Split it. The CTO owns the platform: scaffolded environments, the model gateway, the harness that runs evals, deploy isolation, spend metering, and the enforcement of guardrails. The CPO owns the bar: what the eval set says good looks like for a customer, the guardrail policy for what the product may do or spend on a customer's behalf, the graduation criteria, and the cost-per-outcome target. Both sign the gate to production. The split matters because agents made code cheap and left verification expensive: in an October 2026 survey of 300 engineering leaders for Undo, 79 percent said code is faster and releases aren't, and 35 percent of generated code reached production before the team understood it.

The harness is infrastructure, so the CTO's platform runs it, meters it, and enforces what it decides. What it checks is product, so the CPO writes the bar. Neither side should hold both, and both should sign the gate a build passes before a customer sees it.

That matters more than it used to. Agents made code cheap and left verification expensive, and a third of generated code is reaching production before anyone understands it. The bar is how product stays in the loop.

The full argument, including the split for guardrails and what a CPTO changes, is Code Got Faster. Releases Didn't. The CPO and CTO Have to Split the Substrate., part 3 of The CPO Transition. The platform side is in Engineering Builds the Substrate, Not Features, and the bar side is The Eval Is The Spec.

SOURCES

THE LONG VERSION

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Last reviewed 2026-10-20 · 1 min read