It took one tense meeting to realize we were grabbing knives before deciding what to cook. So we paused and asked: What journeys should a dev complete without opening a Slack thread? What needs to be self-served? What's our "platform MVP"? We weren't building a cathedral.We were starting with one dish: deploying a backend service safely. We chose principles first:✅ GitOps for consistency✅ IaC for transparency✅ Guardrails, not gates The tech came after.