← Glossary
Governance that ships
Governance that ships is governance designed like a product: it earns its place by reducing friction and enabling confident delivery. If governance slows teams down, it’s not governance—it’s theatre.
Definition
- Governance that ships is a lightweight operating model that keeps direction coherent while teams move fast.
- It is defined by decision rights, critique rituals, quality gates, pattern evolution rules, and escalation paths.
- The measure of governance is simple: fewer late reversals, fewer surprises, higher release confidence.
- If governance can’t be explained in one page and executed in one week, it’s probably too heavy for real delivery.
Why it matters
- At VP/Director level, your job is to scale judgment across teams and vendors.
- Without governance, multi-team programs fragment: inconsistent patterns, duplicated work, conflicting decisions.
- In agentic and regulated contexts, governance is the safety layer that makes speed acceptable.
- In practice, this is where many digital programs fail: the concept is understood, but the operating discipline is missing.
Common failure modes
- Governance as permissioning: approvals without clarity, slowing delivery and creating shadow processes.
- Too many ceremonies: reviews that generate opinions, not decisions.
- No escalation: blocked decisions linger until launch pressure forces a bad compromise.
- Rules without learning: patterns exist but never evolve, so teams route around them.
- Governance detached from metrics: nobody measures whether it’s helping.
How I design it
- Start with one critical journey and one team; prove usefulness before scaling.
- Make decision rights explicit: who decides what, at what level, with what input.
- Replace review theatre with decision artefacts: short memos, clear tradeoffs, and owners.
- Define quality gates as risk controls: state model completeness, accessibility, recoverability, instrumentation.
- Run a governance cadence: pattern updates, incident reviews, and adoption signals that change behavior.
- Use a 'minimum viable governance' approach: add mechanisms only when a real failure mode proves they’re needed.
- Treat it as a repeatable pattern: define it, test it in production, measure it, and evolve it with evidence.
Related work
Proof map claims
Case studies
See also
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