Most early teams do not need perfect architecture. They need architecture that survives the next stage of growth.

Here is the quick review checklist we use:

Product Fit

• Does the system support the next 6-12 months of product bets?
• Are we solving real usage bottlenecks or hypothetical ones?

Team Fit

• Can current engineers confidently operate this stack?
• Are onboarding and handoff paths clear?

Cost Fit

• What is the baseline monthly infrastructure cost?
• Which services scale linearly with usage?

Failure Fit

• What fails first under load?
• Is there a graceful degradation path?
• Are alerts tied to user impact, not just system noise?

If a design is elegant but hard to run, it is not ready. Practical reliability wins.