The ideal DevOps project starts with everything stored in source control. As a coach I often find that too little thought is given to how a team will handle their source control branching strategy. Time and time again I have seen how this lone decision determines much of the complexity of both product and process. The ease of your journey to continuous delivery is largely dependent on this decision. I’d like to discuss this idea and talk about teams seeing success when they take time to make this decision and don’t just buy into master-only development or a model such as git flow. Instead, they think about how they want to manage complexity, and it starts with source control and branching strategy.