Adjusting Enterprise Practices for Small Agencies and Solo Developers

I spent way too long trying to implement the perfect Git branching strategy that I’d read about in some Medium article detailing how [insert Mag 7 Company] manages releases. Feature branches, a dedicated develop branch, release candidates the whole production. The team? It was just me and one other developer. We were spending more time on branch management than actually building features.

That’s when it started to click: not everything scales down. We were trying to put a racing harness on your electric scooter.

The Siren Song of the Corporate Blueprint

Here’s the honest truth: most of the impressive tutorials, case studies, and conference talks we consume are authored by companies with an invisible army. They have dedicated DevOps teams, QA departments, product managers, and the entire organizational apparatus. When they rave about their perfect CI/CD pipeline or their documentation standards, they aren’t selling a process; they’re selling the output of scale.

We see this and think, “Yeah, we should definitely be doing code reviews exactly like the company that is a platinum sponsor of the conference.” Without ever asking if we even share the same core problems. Spoiler: Sometimes?

A 100-person team needs elaborate processes because communication overhead scales exponentially. At three people? We can literally spin our chairs around and ask, “Hey, is that feature ready?” Our problems are fundamentally different from coordination issues. The corporate process optimizes for compliance; the small agency must optimize for velocity. Another way to put this is that small teams fail due to different problems than large teams.

Where Our Processes Break

The expensive failures I’ve seen in small agencies are rarely the ones enterprise practices are designed to prevent. We aren’t failing because our staging environment was off by two minor version numbers. The real disasters, the ones that cost us three days of unbilled time, look like this:

  • The client needed a small content update six months post-launch and nobody remembers how the custom field structure works.
  • The talented freelancer who built half the site disappeared, leaving behind a beautiful, completely undocumented mystery.
  • We spent an entire morning tracking down why a critical form stopped working because someone made a “quick fix” directly in production and, in their haste, never mentioned it.

These aren’t CI/CD pipeline failures. These are handoff failures, memory leaks, and the “bus-factor” hitting zero. They are human issues disguised as technical ones.

What Does Scale Down? So, what parts of “Enterprise” actually translate into useful practices for a smaller team? The principles are the same but the solutions look different. We have to distill the purpose, not copy the implementation.

Minimum Viable Documentation

The enterprise solution to documentation is usually a sprawling wiki (Confluence, SharePoint, or whatever flavor of the month) that requires constant maintenance. It quickly becomes an administrative burden no small team can justify, and frankly, is almost always out of date the minute you push to production. What does scale down, however, is the principle of institutional memory. We don’t need theoretical architectural diagrams; we need contextual, repeatable notes that address the weirdest parts of the project. I’ve started just keeping a simple DEPLOYMENT.md file in every repository. This isn’t a guide to Git; it’s a checklist for the “gotchas” that always get missed, the non-obvious task that needs doing, or the cron job that is essential but completely invisible. Writing it takes five minutes when the pain is fresh, and it saves future us.

Disciplined Basics: Version Control & Commit Hygiene

We can absolutely skip the theatrical production of GitFlow with its seven dedicated branch types. I mean, who has the time to police that? But we cannot skip version control itself. The scalable component here is discipline, not complexity. For a small team, two basic practices deliver 90% of the value. First, commit logical, isolated chunks of work. Second, write a commit message that sounds like a rational person wrote it. A message like “Fix bug” tells me nothing six months later. A message like “Fix validation error on contact form when phone field is empty, closes #104” tells me exactly what changed and why. We aren’t implementing mandatory pull requests with three required reviewers; we’re treating our commit history like a shared, readable ledger. The goal isn’t corporate compliance; it’s ensuring that when you’re tracking down that weekend production issue, you don’t curse your past self for an inscrutable change.

Safety Nets: Testing the Obvious

Enterprise teams hold disaster recovery drills; we just need to make sure we’re not lying to ourselves about having a safety net. Backups sound obvious, maybe even boring, but I have personally witnessed times when we had backup scripts that hadn’t successfully run in months, and nobody noticed until the database decided to corrupt during a failed sync. The scalable practice here is simple: test your backups. Don’t just set it and forget it—occasionally try to restore from that safety net. Similarly, the full local-dev-staging-production environment setup isn’t scalable overhead; it’s the bare minimum required for sanity. Trying to shortcut that process guarantees that when you push something to the client’s live site, it will inevitably break due to a missing environment variable or a difference in PHP versions. The human error factor is too high to trust the two-minute fix done directly on production without seeing it run in at least a local and a staging context first.

Security as a Habit, Not a Department

We don’t need to convene a full dependency management strategy meeting every quarter. That’s a process built for maintaining thousands of microservices, not our bespoke marketing site. But we do need to address the basic threat model of running agency work: outdated code is vulnerable code. Enterprise teams have quarterly security audits; we have npm audit and a simple recurring habit. When was the last time we checked if that three-year-old jQuery plugin had known vulnerabilities? Or if Drupal has security updates that prevent a client site from becoming a spam relay? The scalable practice is replacing the bureaucratic security department with personal discipline. This also means simple things that eliminate the easiest attack vectors, like making sure everyone on the team uses a password manager, not just for clients, but for their own dev environments. It’s security as a daily hygiene routine, not a yearly filing exercise.

Ready, Set, Fight!

I am prepared to be shouted at, but here is my honest take on what is often unnecessary, friction-inducing overhead for small teams operating on tight deadlines. These are often the first processes we ditch when prioritizing immediate client value.

Style Guides are a Luxury Product

Living Style Guides and component libraries are an amazing tool for organizations trying to maintain visual consistency across dozens of products and teams. For us? They are a massive waste of time. They become obsolete and out-of-sync almost instantly unless they have a dedicated team maintaining them—and no small agency has that luxury. In a smaller context, the design system lives in the codebase itself and is enforced through peer review. Instead of implementing visual regression testing, we create a simple, repeatable, value checklist for QA. We’re prioritizing shipping the feature over maintaining a beautiful, perfectly documented artifact that nobody ever looks at anyway.

Skip the Formal QA Department

The enterprise goal is isolating QA from development to eliminate bias; that’s compliance. Our goal is velocity and quality. You should never, ever QA your own work—that’s just testing in production with a different title. But we can skip the formal QA department and the complex, time-consuming bug tracking software. Instead, we use the “spin your chair around” QA method. Just grab someone else familiar with the project—your partner, the project manager, or the other developer and have them do a quick run-through. That fresh pair of eyes will catch 90% of the obvious errors. However, glancing at a page is not enough. Checklists are our friends. You have to have enough rigor and engagement to review against certain, defined criteria (like accessibility or mobile behavior) otherwise you’re just introducing another bottleneck without much benefit. The investment in formal QA processes simply doesn’t yield enough ROI for a small team compared to high-leverage peer review supported by a simple checklist.

Automated CI/CD is Overkill

We skip the massive headache of building and maintaining a custom CI/CD pipeline because platforms like Pantheon and WP Engine already handle the heavy lifting of DevOps for us. Their workflow—which gives you CLI access for efficiency but keeps the core push-the-button deployment reliable—is the sweet spot. You realize you’re paying a massive setup and maintenance fee for a few minutes of truly automated saved time per deployment, and that doesn’t pencil out for us. What is needed is a dependable, efficient, battle-tested process, not full automation. Our CI is manual because we run linting and basic checks locally before pushing. The automated pipeline is designed to eliminate the need for trust across dozens of developers; at three people, we save the headache and rely on trust and discipline. The key is having a reliable environment flow: Develop Local $\rightarrow$ Validate on Dev $\rightarrow$ Stage for Client Review $\rightarrow$ Publish to Prod. The real scalable requirement is the ability to provision and deploy these environments quickly and reliably at will.

The Tradeoff on Automated Testing

This is a point of constant, almost religious debate, but here’s the honest truth from the trenches: broad unit test coverage is not an efficient use of time for most small agency projects. If we were building trading algorithms for a bank or flight control software, yes, absolutely. But for a custom marketing site with a handful of specific forms? The time spent writing comprehensive, isolated unit tests often exceeds the time you’d ever save catching obscure bugs later. We are consciously making a different trade-off. We ditch deep unit coverage in favor of confidence built on focused rigor. We perform those tests manually ourselves, running through our checklists and verifying the component logic every time. When we do automate, we focus purely on high-level, mission-critical integration points. The stuff that would actually lose the client. We accept a higher theoretical risk in exchange for immediate gains in velocity.

The Tradeoff

The real adjustment isn’t about which tools we use—it’s about admitting that we are making different, conscious tradeoffs. Enterprise practices optimize for coordination at scale. We are optimizing for velocity with acceptable risk.

This means that yes, sometimes we deploy on a Friday afternoon because the client needs it and we’re confident. It means sometimes we fix things directly in production because spinning up a whole deployment pipeline for a typo is absurd—it’s the three-hour deployment process for a two-minute fix, and no CI/CD pipeline can solve the human review bottleneck. It means we carry more institutional memory in our heads than we probably should because writing everything down really does slow us down.

The trick is knowing which corners are safe to cut and which ones you’ll regret. And honestly? I’m still figuring that out. I’ve been burned both ways: over-engineering small projects into stagnation, and under-documenting things that came back to haunt me at 11 PM on a Sunday.

How many times did the word checklist appear: 6

These days, I think of enterprise practices less as rules to follow and more as a menu of ideas. When I read about how Stripe does deployments or how Netflix approaches monitoring, I’m looking for the principle I can adapt, not the blueprint I must copy.

I’m making those choices consciously now instead of feeling guilty that I didn’t follow someone else’s playbook. We’re not failed enterprise teams. We’re something else entirely, with our own constraints and our own unexpected advantages.

Turns out, that’s just fine.