Every company says it wants speed. Roadmaps talk about velocity. Leadership meetings talk about reducing cycle time. Quarterly goals talk about faster execution and quicker releases. Every business wants teams moving faster. Then many of those same companies make a decision that quietly slows everything down. They optimise for infrastructure flexibility instead of product delivery. It sounds reasonable in the beginning. Teams want control. Engineers want options. Platform architects want systems that can support every future scenario. So production teams start building infrastructure ecosystems around themselves. Deployment pipelines get built from scratch. Cloud resources become heavily customised. Internal platforms gain endless knobs, switches, and configuration layers. New projects begin with architecture discussions instead of customer problems. Months later, software delivery slows down. Product teams miss timelines. Releases move out by quarters. Customer feedback arrives later.…