i got lucky at my last shop. b2b place for like 2x other customer companies. eng manager person (who was also like 3x other managers :/ ) let everything get super broken and unstable.

when i took lead of eng it was quite an easy path to making it clear stability was critical. slow everything down and actually do QA. customer became super happy because basically 3x releases went out with minimal bugs/tweaks required. “users don’t want broken changes immediately, they want working changes every so often” was my spiel etc etc.

unfortunately it was impossible to convince people about that until they screwed it all up. i still struggle to let things “get bad so they can get good”, but am aware of the lesson today at least.

tl;dr sometimes you gotta let people break things so badly that they become open to another way