My Org at Google didn’t ship production code for 3 months

During my time at Google, there was a 3 month period where our entire Org didn't ship any production code.

Yet that was the highest leverage thing we could’ve done for the business.

In the age of AI being able to ship code at breakneck speeds, I need my audience to understand this.

Google Cloud Platform operates at massive global scale. At that scale every line of code could be a multi-million dollar mistake.

Shipping code as fast as possible is not the bottleneck for growing the company. Regardless of how many lines can be written by agents.

Why didn’t we ship code for 3 months? Process.

The earlier quarter, a high-risk code change had contributed to a global outage.

We recovered quickly from the outage because of good recovery processes.

The next 3 months were spent polishing the process for reviewing high risk code changes.

Until there was Org-wide agreement on a process that would be effective, no code was shipped.

The result? The entire next year saw ZERO outages at that previous scale.

While the rate of feature releases steadily rose.

If you’re building at the speed of AI, this is an incredibly important lesson. You can only move as fast as your system can tolerate risk.

You can only ship as fast as your foundation allows. Otherwise the mountain of unexplainable bugs and outages will continue to stack as your product grows.

Good process isn’t the enemy of speed; it protects speed. Align on process now while your product is early. The longer you wait, the more expensive the fix.