Black Belt
Status: drafted · Time: 15 min · Audience: platform-builder Outcome: Understand the Black Belt arc, walk Parts A, B, and C, claim Quests B-1 and B-2, ship Boss Fight B-B, and earn the badge.
Graded artefacts for this belt: 🎮 Quest B-1: Publish a shared skill · 🎮 Quest B-2: Component contribution or full-stack feature · 🏁 Boss Fight B-B: Own a POD’s AI uplift for a month · 🏆 Black Belt badge
Promise. You build the leverage others run on. You author skills and plugins that propagate across PODs. You coach. You shape Razorpay’s AI posture with RFCs, API reviews, and strategy input.
Prerequisite. 🟢 Green Belt + nomination by a manager or a Green Belt teammate. Time budget. 15–25 hours of playbook, plus the boss fight (one-month POD embed). Ramp L-level. L3 (delegating workflows to agents; building with AI).
Status: fully drafted
Section titled “Status: fully drafted”Black Belt is a three-part belt. All three parts are drafted. A nominated builder can read the belt end-to-end, claim Quests B-1 and B-2, ship Boss Fight B-B, and claim the badge.
The next horizon for builders who have closed the belt is the Staff+ Council, the standing community of senior contributors who shape the program’s AI direction over multi-year horizons. Council membership is invitation-only.
Nomination
Section titled “Nomination”Black Belt entry requires nomination by a manager or a Green Belt teammate. Nomination is registered with the cohort lead. Reading the chapters without nomination is fine — the chapters are open. Tracker certification, however, requires the nomination to be recorded before any of the quests are claimed.
What you can say after Black Belt
Section titled “What you can say after Black Belt”“I am a force multiplier for Razorpay.”
The full belt arc
Section titled “The full belt arc”Part A — Build the Platform
Section titled “Part A — Build the Platform”| § | Chapter | Pillar | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| B.1 | Authoring an internal MCP server — architecture, auth, packaging | Harness | 60 min |
| B.2 | Publishing a shared skill — placement, validation, review | Context | 30 min |
| B.3 | Publishing a plugin — package once, prove every surface | Harness | 45 min |
| B.4 | The Claude Agent SDK — when to write your own agent | Harness | 45 min |
| B.5 | Multi-agent orchestration — patterns that work, patterns that don’t | Harness | 45 min |
| B.6 | Tool design — JSON schemas, output shapes, error contracts | Harness | 30 min |
Part B — Push the Craft
Section titled “Part B — Push the Craft”| § | Chapter | Pillar | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| B.7 | Progressive disclosure — skills that stay small | Context | 25 min |
| B.8 | Memory systems — auto-memory, session state, long-running agents | Context | 45 min |
| B.9 | Prompt evals — A/B, regression, golden sets | Prompt | 45 min |
| B.10 | Cost attribution + observability at team + org scale | Harness | 30 min |
| B.11 | Effort settings, model routing, fall-backs | Harness | 30 min |
Part C — Shape the Org
Section titled “Part C — Shape the Org”| § | Chapter | Pillar | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| B.12 | Running office hours — the Whoop / Ramp pattern | Culture | 30 min |
| B.13 | Embedded sprints — the CTO-with-a-team week | Culture | 30 min |
| B.14 | Writing an AI RFC — what good looks like at Razorpay | Governance | 45 min |
| B.15 | Contributing to the API Council (AI-specific reviews) | Governance | 30 min |
| B.16 | Plugin + skill governance — approval, deprecation, security review | Governance | 45 min |
Quests and boss fight
Section titled “Quests and boss fight”Quest B-1 — Publish a shared skill
Section titled “Quest B-1 — Publish a shared skill”Quest B-1. Publish a repository-native shared skill so another POD can install it with one command. At least two installs from PODs outside your team within a month.
Quest B-2 — Component contribution or full-stack feature
Section titled “Quest B-2 — Component contribution or full-stack feature”Quest B-2. Either submit a Blade component via the contribution pipeline, or ship a feature involving a backend change you own end-to-end.
Boss Fight B-B — Own a POD’s AI uplift for a month
Section titled “Boss Fight B-B — Own a POD’s AI uplift for a month”Boss Fight B-B. Embed with a POD outside your own for one month. Pick a shared metric with the POD lead before the embed begins. Intervene through the full Black Belt toolkit. Measure the lift. Write a one-pager case study. Present in an all-hands or the program’s main forum.
Evidence chain
Section titled “Evidence chain”Awarding Black Belt requires evidence per Appendix L:
- Green Belt awarded date (referenced, not duplicated);
- nomination record (manager or Green Belt teammate);
- Quest B-1 — published plugin URL plus install confirmations from two PODs outside the immediate team;
- Quest B-2 — merged contribution or full-stack PR;
- Boss Fight B-B: signed-off metric lift, intervention documentation, all-hands share, contributed case study;
- a one-paragraph “what I built that other teams now run on” reflection from the builder.
The Black Belt badge closes the belt and mirrors the White, Yellow, and Green templates. Two reviewers (one out-of-team, one Black-Belt-or-above) sign the claim.
What to do next
Section titled “What to do next”- If you have just earned Green Belt and been nominated: open Part A README and start with B.1.
- If you have walked Parts A and B and claimed both quests: open Part C README and start with B.12.
- If you have shipped Boss Fight B-B and want to claim the belt: open the badge and follow the claim ceremony.
- If you are a cohort lead: the Black Belt reviewer protocol is stricter than Green’s — at least one out-of-team reviewer per piece of evidence, and the boss fight specifically requires a Black-Belt-or-above reviewer in addition. Direct managers cannot certify their own reports. See Appendix L.
- If you have closed the belt: open the Staff+ Council section. The chapters describe what the Council is, how it operates, and the moves a closed-belt builder can already make: sponsoring an RFC, reviewing a peer’s Boss Fight, mentoring a Black Belt candidate.
Files: belts/04-black/ — organised into subfolders a-platform/, b-craft/, and c-org/, all drafted. Both quests claimable; Boss Fight B-B and the badge close the belt.
Previous: ← Green Belt badge · Next: → Part A README