Every team I've talked to that adopted microservices in the last five years has the same arc: enthusiasm at month one, regret at month nine, sober refactoring at month eighteen. At Xenotix Labs we've shipped 30+ platforms on microservices, and we've made every one of these mistakes at least once. Here are the ones I wish someone had told us about earlier. Mistake 1: Splitting too early The loudest signal that you're splitting too early: you can't ship a feature without coordinating four pull requests across three repos. Microservices made sense on the architecture diagram, but in practice, your team's natural unit of work spans services. Fix: when in doubt, start as a modular monolith with clear internal boundaries.…