Golden Path
also called Paved Road, Paved Path
The supported, documented, pre-integrated way to do a common task, made easier than any alternative rather than mandatory.
The critical design property is that the golden path is optional but overwhelmingly attractive. Mandates create adversaries and exception processes; a path that genuinely takes an afternoon instead of three weeks creates adoption without argument.
What makes it golden is that the hard parts are already solved and invisible: authentication wired up, telemetry flowing, secrets fetched correctly, network policy applied, pipeline scaffolded, on-call rota registered, a dashboard that exists on day one. The team gets a running service and inherits the organisation's accumulated operational knowledge without having to learn it.
Leaving the path must remain possible, because a genuinely unusual workload exists in every estate, and the honest deal is explicit: off-path teams take on the operational burden the platform was carrying. Track how many teams are off-path and why — a rising number is the platform's most important product signal, and usually says the path is missing a capability rather than that the teams are difficult.