From Q2 last year to early this year, I was juggling three product launches, a reorg, and a team that barely spoke to each other. It was frantic. Truly frantic.
On paper, things were humming. Deadlines met. OKRs green. But inside? I felt like a conductor without a score—every musician improvising in a different key. Coordination? Nonexistent. And the worst part? I thought the problem was everyone else.
Now… here's what happened:
We had gone full throttle on decentralization—everyone was autonomous, decisions were async, and teams “owned” their workstreams. That sounds empowering until no one knows what the hell is actually happening.
One team launched a feature the same week another broke its dependencies.
Marketing scheduled a campaign before engineering had tested the thing.
I was getting Slack updates that contradicted Asana.com updates that contradicted people’s mouths.
It was chaos disguised as progress.
And then the straw broke: our most junior associate asked me a simple question—“Who’s actually making the final call on this?”
I didn’t know.
That question haunted me for weeks. Not just because I lacked an answer—but because I realized I had engineered that ambiguity. In my obsession with autonomy, I’d stripped away structure. Everyone was empowered but no one was coordinated. I had built a decentralized system without a coordination model.
I speak from experience when I say: freedom without frameworks is just fatigue with lipstick.
So I did what I should’ve done months earlier—I studied how coordination actually works in systems that need to scale. Not just startups. Systems. Multi-agent ones.
Here’s what I learned:
“Multi-agent systems fail not because agents are bad—but because coordination is an afterthought.”
The Coordination Wake-Up Call
I discovered there are three models that every productivity system ends up dancing with:
[1 of 3] Centralized Coordination
Everything flows through a single gatekeeper. Fast decisions. Clear conflict resolution. But—bottlenecks and burnout are guaranteed. I’d lived this in early-stage startups, where the founder is the bottleneck and hero.
[2 of 3] Decentralized Coordination
No gatekeeper. Agents (or humans) negotiate with each other. Resilient. Adaptive. But it’s hell on information consistency. I was deep in this model—and drowning in misaligned updates.
[3 of 3] Hybrid Coordination
This is where the real magic happens. Local autonomy + global coherence. Teams make fast decisions within their zone, but alignment scaffolding holds the system together. Think: distributed pods with shared protocols, task conventions, and role clarity.
That was my missing piece.
So we rebuilt.
We introduced coordination rituals, not just syncs:
A “gatekeeper map”: Every deliverable now had a final decision owner.
A “shared state dashboard”: One canonical view of what was shipping, owned by everyone.
A “role-based protocol”: Engineers, PMs, and marketers all knew their zones and escalation paths.
We stopped pretending async was enough and built lightweight coordination layers that scaled with us—not against us.
Here’s the real deal:
Autonomy scales performance. But coordination scales trust.
And when trust scales? Execution compounds.
Tweetable Breakthroughs
"Freedom without frameworks is just fatigue with lipstick."
"Autonomy scales performance. Coordination scales trust."
"If everyone owns the workstream, no one owns the outcome."
So, if you’re in the middle of a messy system...
Don’t just add more tools. Or meetings. Or nudges.
Map your coordination model.
Decide—are you centralizing, decentralizing, or blending? And more importantly, why?
Know that this rebuild will be messy, political, and sometimes downright awful—but I promise: it's better than pretending the chaos is normal.
Coordination isn’t a project. It’s a habit.
Start small. Start now.