Governance & ownership
Most systems do not fail on craft. They fail because nobody could say who decides.
Name an owner, not a committee
One named person is accountable for the system's health. A working group advises; it does not approve. In practice this halves the time a component takes to go from proposal to published.
Write the decision rules down
Three published rules cover most cases, and they stop the same argument recurring every sprint. Put them on a page anyone can link to, not in a document people have to be told about.
Fund the boring work
Maintenance, migration support and documentation are the work, not the overhead around it. Budget roughly a third of system capacity for them, and show it on the roadmap by name.
If a decision needs four calendar invites, the system will lose to whoever can ship without them.
Files for this chapter
DOCXGovernance charter templateDownloadXLSXComponent intake & triage sheetDownload