Paved Roads

Making the supported path the easiest path, with a way to leave it.

4Questions

8Flashcards

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Questions

4 to work through

intermediate

An organisation builds a paved road and half the teams build their own infrastructure anyway. What does the adoption gap indicate?

2 min answer
intermediate

How does a paved road achieve governance outcomes without a mandate, and what makes it fail?

2 min answer
advanced

A company builds an internal platform to standardise how services are created and operated across hundreds of teams. What should it enforce, what should it leave flexible, and how does it avoid becoming an obstacle?

3 min answer
advanced

From 2011 the UK's Government Digital Service required central approval for departmental digital spending above a threshold (about £100,000, and zero for some categories such as public-facing websites) alongside a published service standard and assessments. By 2026 the GDS-run controls had been retired in favour of departmental ownership with a much higher pipeline threshold. What did controlling the money achieve that a standards document could not, and where would copying it be a mistake?

4 min answer

Terminology

4 terms in this topic

pattern

Golden Path

A generated, fully-configured starting point for a new service that arrives with observability, pipeline, identity, ownership and cost attribution al…

metric

Golden Path Adoption

The proportion of teams voluntarily using the supported path, which is the honest measure of whether a platform is solving real problems.

pattern

Paved Roads

A supported, opinionated default path that is the easiest way to do the right thing — governance by convenience rather than by mandate.

practice

Spend Control Gate

Architecture governance applied at the point money is committed rather than at design review, so the conversation happens while the decision is still…

Enterprise Architecture