Our build was red on staging. We deployed anyway. No one stopped it.
If you’ve worked in a startup shipping fast, you’ve seen this. Not because people are lazy, but because pressure distorts reality. Every team member sees the countdown, sees product pinging for updates. No one wants to block progress. You assume someone else will raise the flag.
It’s easy to blame process or tooling, but that’s not the core problem. The real failure is cultural. If your engineers feel like stopping a release invites blame or kills momentum, they’ll stay silent. Deadlines, not quality, start driving behavior.
You fix this by making safety visible. Last month, I told my team: “Your job isn’t to ship features. Your job is to ship value and protect users. If something feels off, you stop the line—even when it’s awkward, even if product is shouting.” Then I backed it up in a retro when someone did exactly that. No finger-pointing. No escalation. Just learning.
“Done” doesn’t mean it runs locally, or even that it works on staging. “Done” means everyone believes it’s safe for users. That’s the only real finish line.
We still move fast. But now, pausing is a sign of strength, not weakness. That changes everything.