Architecture & practice·Teams, ownership and Conway's law
there was a supported way to spin up a new service, and doing it that way took an afternoon instead of a fortnight.
Golden path
Also calledpaved road, paved path
A supported, opinionated, well-lit route for doing common engineering work — creating a service, adding a database, shipping to production. It is not a mandate: teams may leave the path, but they carry the operational burden themselves, which makes the choice honest. It is how a platform organisation gets standardisation without a governance board, because the standard route is genuinely the easy one.