And yet still we have to make the determination: Is this worthy of the bigger process? Our could we just ship it, and see what happens? Knowing when to accept the risk of the latter is part of how you prevent getting bogged down in process for things that just don't merit it. And sometimes you'll get that wrong! Something that looked innocuous will be consequential, and you have to clean it up. That's the nature of the criticality bet. You need to have the stomach to keep playing, even if you occasionally lose a hand. You're playing anyway unless you're doing the crazy multiple-teams-doing-adversarial-solutions stuff that I've heard of in pacemaker development. So don't sweat it, calibrate it!

But competence isn't the only input to pace. Risk tolerance is just as important, if not more so.