November 13, 2025 · 5 min read

When Collaboration Slows Execution (And When It Doesn’t)

PostHog published a piece called “Collaboration Sucks” that got a lot of attention. The title is provocative, but the actual insight is straightforward: most organizations confuse consensus-seeking with collaboration, and it kills velocity.

Here’s what they got right, what they missed, and what it means for engineering execution at scale.

Two Different Problems

PostHog describes a real problem: someone posts work-in-progress, ten people chime in with “curious what X thinks,” and suddenly the driver is stuck explaining context instead of shipping.

This is responsibility diffusion masquerading as teamwork. People inserting themselves into decisions they don’t own and shouldn’t be making.

Real collaboration happens when multiple people need to build shared understanding of a problem to solve it. The distinction matters because the solution to bad collaboration isn’t zero collaboration – it’s clarity about who owns what.

The Restaurant Kitchen Model

I spent years opening restaurants in New York. A kitchen during service is a good model for execution under pressure.

Twelve stations, each executing independently. No real-time collaboration on whether the fish needs more salt or the vegetables are properly blanched. Everyone knows their scope and executes within it.

But that only works because collaboration already happened – during prep, during menu development, during the architectural decisions about how the kitchen would operate. By service, the system is set. You execute.

The collaboration that matters happens before the pressure. The execution that matters happens during it.

Where PostHog Is Right

Their core observation is correct: asking for input by default slows things down without improving outcomes.

“Curious what X thinks” is almost always cover for not wanting to own a decision. “Let’s discuss” delays action without adding clarity. Most feedback in most code reviews is style nitpicking that could be automated.

The screenshot they show with ten reviewers on a single PR is pathological, but it’s not uncommon. I’ve seen it. You’ve probably seen it.

That environment doesn’t produce better code. It produces engineers who stop making decisions.

Where They Miss the Mark

The article conflates two things: collaboration as a process and collaboration as a skill.

As a process, yes, too much collaboration creates overhead. As a skill, collaboration is how you build anything non-trivial. The question isn’t whether to collaborate. It’s when, with whom, and on what.

Elite engineers collaborate less because they’ve internalized enough context that they don’t need constant validation. When they do collaborate, it’s specific: technical input from specific people on specific decisions.

That’s the model that scales.

The Phases Framework

Here’s the distinction PostHog doesn’t make clearly:

Collaborate on architecture. System design, technology choices, API contracts, data models – these are foundational decisions that benefit from multiple perspectives. This is where design docs and technical review matter.

Execute on implementation. Once the architecture is set, you need clear ownership. Someone ships without requiring consensus on every line of code.

The mistake most organizations make: they rush architectural decisions to “move fast” then drown implementation in review processes to “maintain quality.” Should be the opposite.

The Elite Capacity Model

At Gun.io, we work with senior-level engineers who execute with minimal overhead. Here’s what that actually looks like:

They know when to seek input and when to ship. They understand the boundaries of their scope. They can operate independently because they’ve done this before and know what good looks like.

Professional judgment about when collaboration adds value.

The CTOs we work with understand this intuitively. They’re not looking for someone to hand-hold through every decision. They’re looking for proven capability that extends their capacity without extending their coordination overhead.

The Bus Factor Problem

The obvious objection: what if the person who owns everything gets hit by a bus?

Fair. But consider the alternative: a team so paralyzed by collaborative process that nobody can ship anything. You have a velocity problem that’s worse than any bus factor risk.

The solution is better knowledge transfer when it matters: pair programming on complex systems, code reviews that teach, documentation that captures architectural decisions.

We build this into how we work. Knowledge transfer happens at handoff points, not at every decision.

What Engineering Leaders Should Do

The framework is straightforward:

Collaborate heavily on:

System architecture and foundational decisions
Cross-team interfaces
Hiring and team composition
Post-mortems and failure analysis

Execute independently on:

Implementation within defined scope
Tactical technical decisions
Code organization
Most features and bug fixes

The key is clarity about ownership. PostHog calls this “you’re the driver.” That works. But the driver needs to know the destination, the constraints, and why it matters. That context comes from collaboration.

Outcome Verification

At Gun.io, our vetting process is built around real outcomes on real projects. We don’t just interview developers and review code samples. We verify they’ve actually delivered on production systems under real constraints.

This matters because it’s the only way to identify engineers who know when to collaborate and when to execute. You can’t fake that in a technical interview. You can see it in someone’s track record of shipping.

When you work with engineers who’ve proven they can deliver, the collaboration overhead drops. They know their scope, they know when to escalate, and they know when to just ship.

The Real Point

Bad collaboration kills velocity. Collaboration without ownership, without clear decision-makers, without understanding when to converge and when to execute.

Good engineering organizations collaborate intensely on things that matter, then execute with speed on everything else.

They hire people who don’t need constant direction. They set clear ownership. They trust execution.

That’s how senior-level engineering capacity works.

If you want to talk more about restaurant kitchens and execution under pressure, hit me up on LinkedIn. For those devs on the app, you know where to find me.