As parts of the platform moved to the cloud, the team focused on increasing deployment speed. Automation improved, pipelines stabilized, and changes flowed into production more frequently. From the outside, this looked like progress: fewer manual steps, faster releases, and shorter wait times between changes.
What became clear quickly was that speed alone didn’t make change safer.
When incidents occurred, recovery was often fast, but understanding lagged behind. It wasn’t always clear who was closest to a change, what assumptions had been made, or how responsibility was distributed. The system recovered, but the path to explanation was fragmented, even though everyone involved was acting in good faith.
GitOps practices made system state more explicit, but they also exposed a new tension. Decisions were being encoded and executed quickly — sometimes faster than shared understanding could keep up. The mechanics of change had improved, but the team’s ability to reason together about failure had not.
After several uncomfortable incidents, the team began holding blameless incident reviews more consistently. These weren’t used to assign fault or slow delivery, but to reconstruct what had happened while context was still intact. The conversations surfaced assumptions about ownership, escalation, and decision-making that had never been fully articulated.
What surprised the team was how much ambiguity had been hidden by slower delivery in the past. When changes moved infrequently, unclear ownership didn’t always surface as a problem. As speed increased, that ambiguity showed up immediately during recovery.
Over time, incident reviews began to change behavior upstream. Questions about ownership and involvement started appearing earlier — sometimes before changes were deployed at all. Responsibility didn’t become rigid, but it became clearer, and decisions were easier to reason about under pressure.
Insight: increasing deployment speed without clarifying ownership made the system harder to govern. By pairing faster delivery with shared sensemaking around failure, the team reduced recovery friction, improved decision quality, and made speed something leadership could trust rather than fear as the migration continued.