The "Fruit Basket" problem: Rebuilding PayFit's platform trust & alignment

If I have to touch infrastructure, I double my estimate. In early 2025, that was the prevailing sentiment among developers at PayFit. It wasn't that we didn't have tools, we had plenty. We also had a platform team. Actually, we had five of them. And that was exactly the problem. The Organizational Pendulum Between 2019 and 2022 , PayFit swung between two extremes: During our hyper growth phases, we’d have a centralized platform team building abstractions in a vacuum. By the time COVID hit, the pendulum swung the other way, we’d embed SREs directly into product teams to "bring DevOps culture", only to find they were being pulled into daily firefighting instead of building leverage. We oscillated between monorepos and multi repos. Every swing left behind "ghost" migrations, half-finished initiatives from 2021 or 2022 that developers were still forced to maintain in 2024 . The "Scorecard" Era Trust reached an all time low during what I call the "Scorecard Era" around 2023 . We had SREs em