It is easy to get a CI/CD pipeline running. It is harder to get one that your team trusts enough to deploy on a Friday afternoon without hesitation.
Start with the basics: are builds reproducible, or do they depend on whatever happens to be cached on a runner? Are tests actually gating deployment, or just reporting results after the fact?
Beyond that, look at rollback. If a deployment breaks production, can your team revert in under a minute, or does it require someone manually SSHing into a server at 2am?
Finally, security: are secrets managed properly, are dependencies scanned, and is there an audit trail of what was deployed, when, and by whom?
Our DevOps & Automation team builds pipelines around these questions specifically, along with the infrastructure-as-code and observability needed to know quickly when something goes wrong.