The full Navigator Framework, compressed for startups and small teams. Stages 0 through 2. Three roles. 11 controls. Single-paragraph attestations. Governance-grade rigour without enterprise overhead — and without the parts that only matter at Stage 3 and above.
Navigator Lite trades away redundancy — not rigour. Four things are unchanged from the full framework regardless of team size. These are the structural minimum that makes governance meaningful rather than theatrical.
Least-privilege execution, verified by test — NAV-2.2, a Hard control. No relaxation by team size. A partial sandbox fails silently, and a small team can least afford to discover that in production.
A named, qualified human provides recorded approval before AI output advances. Not "someone is involved somewhere" — a specific, accountable, auditable act, per NAV-1.3/2.5.
The AI reviewing output must be a different model from the one that produced it. A model is blind to its own failure modes. Same-model self-review is not independence — NAV-2.6.
There is no informal exception path. Every exception requires a named approver, a hard expiry date, and a retrospective review — NAV-G.3. Governance dies through accumulated informal waivers.
Navigator Lite compresses the full framework without removing its structural integrity. Here is exactly what changes — and what does not.
Navigator Lite runs on the same five-stage ladder as the full framework — it just doesn't go past Stage 2. What changes is the depth of evidence required at each stage gate, scaled to the risk class of your project.
Stages 1 and 2 close on 11 controls total (vs 33 across all four stages in the full framework). These are the controls that, if missed, represent a genuine governance failure — not a process gap.
In a startup, one person often wears many hats. Navigator Lite requires three distinct humans — not three distinct job titles. The constraint is independence, not headcount.
Owns engineering decisions and the harness — sandbox, checkpoint enforcement, kill switch. Named owner for advancing Stage 1→2. Can be CTO, senior engineer, or founding engineer.
Owns requirements, risk classification, and the exception process. Named owner for Stage 0→1. Can be CEO, CPO, or product lead.
A named person who did not author the AI work under review. Can be another engineer, a trusted advisor, or a fractional principal. Must rotate — cannot review their own output.
Class is set at project charter time by Tech Lead + Founder, using the same five determinants as the full framework (reversibility, named accountability, explainability, regulatory classification, blast radius), and revisited only if scope changes materially. If your work hits High or Critical criteria, Navigator Lite does not apply — move to the full framework.
No customer PII. No revenue path. Fully reversible. Single-artifact blast radius.
Revenue-affecting, customer-facing, or handles GDPR-grade data. Team or product blast radius.
Navigator Lite is designed to grow with you. Move to the full framework when any of the following apply — not before, but not after either.
When you're ready to upgrade, a Navigator Audit is the cleanest path — it assesses your current governance posture against the full framework and tells you exactly what needs to change, in priority order.
Download Navigator Lite as a PDF and adopt the framework. When your team grows or your risk class changes, the full Navigator Framework is one step away.