A story of Netflix adopting StackStorm for autoremediation is a nice illustration of this approach. They began to build a tool, learned enough to be dangerous, discovered StackStorm and used it, experimented with it like with a breadboard, until finally figured out exactly what works - and reimplemented it. All these time learning the system was working and delivering vale.
Part of this story is here https://netflixtechblog.com/introducing-winston-event-driven...
Disclamer: StackStorm founder here (but not pitching).