When do you let a team off the golden path, and how do you stop that becoming the new default?

Refuse every exception and teams leave the platform without telling you. Grant them freely and you are patching nine stacks. The detail that decides it is whether the exception has an expiry date.

Updated Oct 2026 · Grounded in researched DevOps, SRE and platform engineering interview loops, written to a senior-engineer editorial bar, and never padded to hit a word count.