🔗 Every layer of review makes you 10x slower

Every layer of approval in a process makes it approximately 10x slower in wall-clock time, primarily due to waiting and coordination overhead. A simple bug fix takes 30 minutes to code, 5 hours to peer review, a week for design approval, and 12 weeks if another team must schedule it.

Sustainable speed improvement requires fewer reviews rather than faster reviewers, as AI cannot overcome latency bottlenecks in approval pipelines. Quality improvement should focus on system-wide engineering practices and trust, following Deming's philosophy, rather than adding more QA layers that create perverse incentives and reduce actual quality.