Signal Stewardship: A 5‑Minute Habit to Keep Metrics Honest

Core insight: signals slowly decay when ownership and light upkeep fall away. Signal Stewardship is a repeatable five‑minute weekly ritual any exec can require: pick one high‑leverage signal (metric, alert, model output), confirm its source and last transform, rate health on three quick dimensions (accuracy, latency, relevance), and apply exactly one reversible micro‑fix. Concrete paste-ready steward token example you can copy: "SupportTagSpike | Alice, SRE | events->bucket->rate | B | tighten threshold." In this 10‑minute episode you get the 1‑line steward token, a downloadable 1‑page steward checklist, three copy‑paste health checks to run under 300 seconds, enforcement patterns (rotating steward calendar and one‑line minutes), two constrained AI prompts to draft provenance and a micro‑fix, and a short 7‑day pilot with a micro case study: how an SRE tightened a noisy alert and cut paging by 40% in a week. Actionable, low‑friction, reversible.