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Interesting take on changing systems without relying on heroism and without trying to get prioritized project that don’t seem to have business value. Letting things fail (in a controlled way) can help align and change the systems. Being proactive is not always the best approach.
Things did indeed break. But as they did something else happened: our product team began to see the legacy system would not support the business goals and they went from somewhat passive admirers of the theory to active evangelists of the platform work. As the legacy system buckled under new demands, the conversation quickly evolved from, “How do I prioritize this new feature?” to “How do we create space for holistic system work such that we can build better features?” When it became evident the platform work supported the net-new work, the product and engineering teams led prioritization together.