Couldn't agree more. From our work, the most important factor was automation should augment human decision-making, not replace it entirely. We initially struggled with performance bottlenecks but found that feature flags for gradual rollouts worked well. The ROI has been significant - we've seen 70% improvement.

Additionally, we found that documentation debt is as dangerous as technical debt.

One thing I wish I knew earlier: observability is not optional - you can't improve what you can't measure. Would have saved us a lot of time.

Here's our full story with this. We started about 19 months ago with a small pilot. Initial challenges included tool integration. The breakthrough came when we improved observability. Key metrics improved: 40% cost savings on infrastructure. The team's feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, though we still have room for improvement in documentation. Lessons learned: communicate often. Next steps for us: expand to more teams.

Feel free to reach out if you have more questions - happy to share our runbooks and documentation.