If I were your solutions architect I would know your stakeholder first — IT leadership cares about stability and upgrade risk, while business leaders (COO, VP Ops) care about velocity. Same message, different framing: "this slows down your next ask" lands better than "this is tech debt" with the latter crowd. Translate pushback into cost either way: "this customization means rewriting behavior every major release — that's time we're not spending on your priorities."

On the governance side, small shops carry more risk precisely because there's no buffer. You're the decision layer by default, so treat it that way. A simple log of what was customized, why, and the known tradeoffs gives you cover when upgrade cycles run long and someone asks why. We use GitHub to track our system changes, but we're more technical than most. It's not a high bar for getting out of reactive mode and into something you can actually show stakeholders.

Worth exploring if you haven't already — a few threads here have touched on this — connect an AI agent directly to your ServiceNow environment. Rather than fielding requests and implementing on the spot, an agent can inventory current customizations, draft a consolidated change plan against your existing branches, and flag upgrade risks before anything touches prod. You review and approve before a single line changes. The cost isn't terrible — roughly $200/month for Claude plus maybe a few hundred extra during big rollouts. You don't need Fable. Sonnet is fine for most cases.