As the cloud migration accelerated, the team felt constant pressure to keep delivery moving. Multiple streams of work were in flight, dependencies shifted week to week, and slowing down didn’t feel like an option.
To protect progress, work was developed in long-lived branches. The intention was sound: avoid breaking the mainline and isolate risk. In practice, that isolation delayed integration problems until late, when conflicts were harder to understand and failures felt sudden and costly. When something broke, it was difficult to tell whether the issue came from the change itself or from everything else that had shifted around it.
The team decided to experiment with shortening the merge cycle. There was no mandate or rollout plan — just an agreement to integrate more frequently and see what actually happened. The expectation was that this might introduce more interruptions or slow delivery.
What changed was not the amount of friction, but when and how it showed up.
Integrating more frequently surfaced problems earlier. Conflicts were smaller. Failures were easier to trace to a specific change. When something broke, recovery required less coordination and less reconstruction of context.
There were uncomfortable moments. Some merges failed quickly. A few changes had to be reworked sooner than planned. But those failures were contained, and the team spent less time diagnosing issues after the fact.
Over time, the team’s decision-making shifted. Instead of asking whether a branch was “ready,” they began asking what the smallest next integration could be. Risk didn’t disappear, but it became visible earlier, when there was still room to respond.
Insight: shortening the merge cycle didn’t make delivery magically faster, but it made risk governable. Problems surfaced sooner, decisions got smaller, and recovery required less cross-team coordination — making the migration more predictable and manageable even as delivery pressure remained high.