[nrh]

This. This is so often overlooked. Getting your architecture to roughly align with your team structure can do wonders, even if there's only a hallway dividing people. When a small team can iterate and evolve a chunk of code independent of anyone outside the team, it really unshackles them.

There are obviously patterns for doing this in monoliths (or, say, mobile clients - another type of monolith), but at some point you are bound by the dependencies inherent in a single runtime.