1. The access collection black hole You need Figma access, Google Analytics, WordPress admin, GitHub, and the client's Slack. You ask. They forward a password email from two years ago. You ask again. Their developer says they'll get back to you. Three days pass. The fix: Send a single, complete access list on Day 1 — not "we'll need some access" but the exact list, with specifics for each tool,
It was 2:47 AM when the alerts started. A seemingly straightforward database migration had triggered a cascading failure across three downstream services, and our payment processing pipeline was dropping roughly 12% of transactions. The on-call engineer didn't need to wake anyone, locate a rollback script, or wait for a CI pipeline to churn through another deploy. She opened the LaunchDarkly dashb