¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It's worked for me thus far. Actually, most of the time the situations have improved. If you go about raising your concerns tactfully, people start

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It's worked for me thus far. Actually, most of the time the situations have improved. If you go about raising your concerns tactfully, people start taking your opinions more seriously because you accurately forecasted problems in the past. It can also work to just take a little longer on a feature and do some cleanup/fixing without getting permission. If anyone bothers you about it, just say "I noticed this issue and wanted to avoid running into problem xyz again since it took us offline last week." Again, most of this boils down to tact. Project managers don't like looking bad to upper management. Usually you just have to point out (tactfully!) how dumb they will look if something crashes in prod on a weekend.