Field Notes - Dec 17, '25

Executive Signals

• Plumbing is the product: reusable orchestration compounds integration velocity and reduces future toil
• One scheduler, one truth: manual prod commands are the breach; enforce guardrails
• Support before sparkle: post-launch freeze accelerates learning and keeps MTTR within bounds
• Secrets have seasons: per-environment credentials shrink blast radius and ease audits
• Holidays aren’t heroic: cut over after freezes so owners are present and accountable
• Velocity needs a story: pitch units per day with buffers and coverage

Marketing

Turn Integration Velocity into a Narrative

Once the platform plumbing lands, new OEM or partner adapters ship fast. Translate that speed into a credible story: a reusable platform that onboards partners quickly, with buffers so promises survive reality. Frame progress in coverage and throughput, not brand name bingo.

• Publish real build and test times, then pitch in units per day with margin
• Group launches into small batches and verify before scaling the count
• Lead with coverage percentage of target partners and keep a running scorecard

Engineering

Cutovers After Holidays, Not Before

Avoid flipping major automations right before a holiday freeze. Schedule cutovers for the first fully staffed business morning after out-of-office windows so accountable owners are present and you aren’t paging people mid-break. Pair this with explicit go/no-go and a ready rollback.

• Set the cutover for the first staffed morning post-freeze
• Require a same-day go/no-go with the accountable owner
• Pre-stage rollback and monitoring before the meeting

Run Prod from Dev Only with Guardrails

Temporary “prod run from dev” can work when repos are identical, but only with explicit approvals and safety rails. The scheduler isn’t the real risk; manual commands that bypass it and mutate production are. Treat exceptions as time-boxed, auditable deviations.

• Add environment checks and prompts for destructive actions; block cross-environment resets
• Enforce one active scheduler per environment as the source of truth; log all manual runs
• Capture executive sign-off for any exception and time-box it

Most Work Is Plumbing: Make It Reusable

Adapters are the easy 10–30%. The hard 70–90% is plumbing: orchestration, queues, dashboards, DevOps, and CRM touchpoints. Build these as first-class, reusable assets so Phase 2 and beyond become bolt-on instead of rebuilds.

• Track “reusable percentage of effort” as a program metric
• Standardize an adapter interface and message contracts
• Invest early in error surfaces and idempotency

Plan a Post-Launch Support Freeze

After first run, pause net-new feature work and shift core builders to stabilization. Focused attention on real failures avoids context switching, improves learning, and reduces time to repair. Make the freeze explicit and owned.

• Freeze feature work for about five working days post-cutover
• Stand up actionable error logs and alerts with owners and SLAs
• Pre-define incident classes and playbooks

Separate Secrets by Environment

Stakeholders will ask for per-environment credentials. If you must share temporarily, explicitly bound the risk and exit quickly. Least privilege and rotation are non-negotiable, with monitoring to catch cross-environment access.

• Scope to least privilege; rotate on schedule and at cutover
• Monitor usage and alert on cross-environment access attempts
• Commit to per-environment secrets before the next phase gate