---
name: design-golden-path
description: "Design a paved road that is the lowest-friction compliant option, with self-service actions and guardrails. Reach for this on a paved-road question."
---

# Skill: Design golden path

A mandate harder than the workaround loses to shadow tooling (§3 #2).

## Step 1 — Map the developer journey
The steps a team takes today, with each ticket and hand-off marked as debt (§3 #4).

## Step 2 — Pave the easy path
Make the compliant option the lowest-friction one via self-service (§3 #2 #4).

## Step 3 — Set the guardrails
A policy check on the paved action, not a human ticket (§3 #4).

## Step 4 — Decide pave vs mandate
Pave unless impossible; quantify removed toil via `platform_engineering_idp_calc.py toil`.

## Output
A golden-path design that is the easy compliant option, with guardrails and removed toil named. Traverse Tree 2 in the decision-trees file.