I've run programs at Intuit, Atlassian, Adobe, Salesforce, Roku, Apple, and a startup I helped build from nothing. Different scales, different cultures, different stakes. A few things held true at every single one.
The first is that the hard problem is almost never the technology. It's getting people who don't report to each other, who have different goals, to converge on one outcome. The companies that did this well had nothing to do with how good their engineers were. They had clear ownership and short feedback loops. The ones that struggled had neither, no matter how strong the talent.
The second is that clarity beats process. The teams that shipped didn't have the most elaborate frameworks. They had the clearest answers to who owns this, what breaks without it, and what I decided and why. Process is just a way to produce that clarity, and most orgs have far more process than clarity.
The surprise, after nineteen years: the fundamentals don't change with scale. A startup and Apple are wildly different in size and stakes, but the actual job is the same. Find the constraint, name the owners, sequence the work, tell the truth early. Everything else is local detail layered on top of those four.