[inhumantsar]

autonomy will absolutely lead to bloat if there isn't an accountability mechanism in place.

at my last job as head of eng at a small (15-20 devs), I pushed teams to build their dashboards with business metrics in addition to the usual operational metrics. things like costs, customer frustration signals and support ticket volumes, product metrics, etc would show up there.

integrating these initially is non-trivial, but once the data is flowing, it's easy for teams to pick them up. gives a good sense of ownership, helps teams address these proactively (or build a business case for addressing them), and gives the team+stakeholders a common dataset so everyone has the same complete picture to work from.