Adding extra reviewers creates a hidden pipeline where each pending choice blocks the next step, turning the organization into a waiting room rather than a production line. When a decision sits, the team either stalls or builds work around an assumption that may later be overturned, wasting effort and eroding trust. In a mid‑size hardware startup, the engineering lead posted a design review request on the shared board.

The product manager, the compliance officer, and the finance director each added comments, but none signed off for three weeks; the engineers kept iterating on a prototype that later had to be scrapped when the finance team finally vetoed the cost model. The root cause was not the number of stakeholders but the lack of a hard deadline that forces a binary outcome, which lets each participant treat the request as low‑priority. By imposing a “decision deadline” and a “fallback owner” rule, the same team reduced pending decisions by half and saw feature velocity climb within a month.

The paradox is clear: more decision capacity can create more indecision, and the only cure is to make the queue itself time‑boxed.