What you can safely skip
Extensive documentation that nobody reads anyway. Long-form design reviews when you have a clear brief and an experienced team. Bi-weekly stakeholder syncs when the stakeholders are in the channel. Elaborate staging environments when your production environment is well-instrumented and you can roll back in 90 seconds.
What you can't
QA on the critical path. A shared understanding of what 'done' means before you start building it. Accessibility. Error handling on third-party integrations. These are the things that kill launches or, worse, create post-launch incidents that take weeks to clean up.
The counter-intuitive lesson
Teams under pressure often cut the things that would help them move faster — shared context, clear ownership, small batch sizes — and keep the things that slow them down — big meetings, long sign-off chains, speculative features. The pattern is remarkably consistent.
What holds under pressure
Clear ownership — one person per decision, not a committee. Small scope — the difference between a two-week sprint and a three-month project is usually scope, not time. Continuous deployment — teams that ship daily can course-correct daily. These three things hold under pressure because they're the things that were working before the pressure arrived.