Universal Containers (UC) has two major releases every year and the team always runs into...

To reduce deployment time, UC can use the following strategies:

Use recent deployment validations and the quick deploy feature, which can allow them to skip the validation step in production and deploy the changes faster, if they have already validated the changes in a sandbox within the last four days.

Specify the test to run by using RunSpecifiedTests test level, which can allow them to run only the tests that are relevant to the components being deployed, instead of running all the tests in the org.