Governance Without Gatekeeping

Governance is one of those topics I find myself coming back to on almost every engagement. Not because teams ask about it directly, but because the effects of getting it wrong show up everywhere else: in systems that are consistent but oddly still, in designers who've stopped filing requests, in the gap between what's in the library and what's actually getting built in product files across the org.

Most governance models get built before anyone has asked what they're actually for. Sometimes it's a fear — someone will merge a one-off pattern into the system, or make a decision that takes months to unpick, so the process gets built to catch those things: review stages, approval chains, contribution checklists, with more gates added each time something slips through. Sometimes it's just a feeling that a system at this scale ought to have one.

The trouble is that gates don't distinguish between a bad contribution and a slow one. They add friction to both, and the people most likely to stop engaging when the process feels heavy are exactly the people you most want inside it. Strong contributors have options. They can build outside the system, work around it, or simply disengage, and the system gradually loses the thing it most needs to stay relevant: contact with the people using it every day.

That's the part that tends to get missed. A lot of process design focuses on keeping bad contributions out. The more expensive problem, in my experience, is good contributors deciding the process isn't worth the effort.

I've watched teams go through this cycle a few times now. A contribution causes problems, the process tightens, and for a moment it looks like governance is working. What you don't see until later is who stopped showing up. The people who disengage first aren't the ones who were filing bad contributions. They're the ones who had good ideas and couldn't get through it, or decided the effort wasn't worth it. The requests just stop coming. From the outside, that can look like the process is doing its job.

That's the visible part. What's less obvious is the guilt that tends to come with it — low-level, persistent, never quite resolved. They know they should be contributing. The system is right there. But every time they think about it, the process looms, and it's easier to avoid it than to start. That's a lot of emotional weight to add to someone's working day, and it rarely shows up in any governance metric.

The quality conversation is everywhere right now, and I'm not dismissing it. But in my experience, quality follows ownership. If the people using the system every day don't feel like they have a stake in it, the standards become something to comply with rather than something to care about. The teams I've seen manage it well have spent as much time thinking about who the process is serving as they have on making it rigorous.

A new icon variant and a change to the token architecture are not the same kind of decision, and treating them identically creates friction where there doesn't need to be any. The more precisely you can draw that line, the less the whole thing feels like it exists to slow people down. A contribution that's 80% right and comes with a clear understanding of the gaps is more useful than no contribution at all, because it invites a conversation rather than closing one. Some of the most useful contributions I've seen are the ones that arrived incomplete, because they gave the team something real to respond to.

The clearest sign that governance is working isn't a low rate of inconsistent contributions. It's a high rate of people who feel like they can contribute without it becoming a bureaucratic exercise. Most teams never measure that. They track consistency and quality, but not engagement — which means the thing most likely to tell you whether governance is working is also the thing most likely to go unnoticed until it's already a problem.

At Baseline, it's something we think about carefully when I'm helping teams build or rebuild their contribution model — because the cost of getting it wrong isn't just a messier system. It's people. If your team is working through this, we'd love to hear where you're at and see if we can help.

📬 From the inbox

We've had some really thoughtful questions come through the inbox since we opened it up, and this one was particularly timely:

The exhaustion makes complete sense, and I'm sorry you're feeling it. Layoffs are rarely as personal as they feel — companies change direction, restructure, decide they need something different six months from now. The quality of the work, the effort put in, the hand raised for the right projects — none of that disappears because a funding decision went a different way.

Those two things are probably more connected than they seem. The pace right now is relentless. By the time anything comes close to settling, a new tool has dropped or the conversation has moved on, and I say that as someone who just added "Empire of AI" to my reading list after seeing it in your message. The anxiety isn't something you can certify your way out of — and honestly, most people are only just starting to figure that out (myself included).

The IC and leadership work you've built doesn't expire because the tools changed. The ones who get through this tend to just keep doing the work in front of them, rather than waiting for the uncertainty to clear first.

Your optimism sounds grounded, and for what it's worth, I think it's the right view. We're still early in all of this. A lot of the current disruption is happening at a moment when AI pricing and capabilities are still in flux, which means workflows and priorities being built around them now are going to need reassessing. The dust will settle, and we'll get a much clearer picture of where this technology actually helps and whether it's truly practical for most teams.

— Thanks for reading, and see you next week! 👋💛