Is Your Model Good Enough to Deploy? The Restaurant That Served a 95% Perfect Dish — But the 5% Was Food Poisoning

Your model has 95% accuracy. Ship it? Not so fast. What's the 5% error? What was the baseline? What does the business need? What happens when it fails? Here's the complete checklist for deciding if your model is production-ready — because "pretty good" metrics have launched pretty bad disasters.