Yesterday, I talked about governance. That sounds like a really big word, but most of it is rather simple.
I think of it like the standards the team agrees to follow. It's the policy that says who is responsible for what, the checklist that defines "done" and the patterns that stops different teams from solving the same problem different ways.
The thing is, all those things matter only if they show up where your team works.
If they live in a document nobody opens during planning, design review, refinement or QA, they're less than useless. They won't change much and your team will still make the same decisions under pressure, using whatever information happens to be available at that time. They'll likely forget they had any document to begin with.
Work will slip and accessibility becomes inconsistent.
All because the useful guidance is too far detached from the work.
Good governance should remove decisions or at least make everyday decisions easier.
In planning, it helps you spot risk before work begins. In design review, it helps people agree what "done" looks like. In QA, it gives testers something clear to check against.
I always found that useful.
And it's without asking your team to remember another process. It all works with your current process to make it even clearer.
You might think your team is too small for all this. You have plenty of leeway to review everything, sit in all the meetings and you can figure it out as you grow.
Maybe. But once you start growing, you can't sit in every meeting or personally review every feature. You need people to make better decisions without waiting for permission or inventing their own version of quality each time. But by that time, the process will have become so ingrained in how they work, it'll be costly too change.
It'd be easier if you started today, with your current process, current team and that "plenty of leeway" you still have.