The order to build MLOps in when you have one model, not fifty

A five-person team brought me in last month to help ship their first production model, a churn scorer that flags accounts likely to cancel in the next 30 days. Before I looked at a single line of their training code, I found out they had already signed a contract for a feature store. One model. Zero other models sharing features. That contract was real money going toward a problem they did not have yet. This kept happening across projects this year, so I want to write down the order I actually…