I feel this tension, but I think something has gone awry if people feel like every comment has to be addressed to everyone’s satisfaction. Comments are not commitments, and commenters don’t have an equal stake in the decision—they certainly don’t own the decision, and it’s okay to disagree and commit.

It’s also probably worth being explicit that there is a cost to inaction that can exceed the costs of building the wrong thing. A year or two ago I was lead on a project where we didn’t know the answer to a big ambiguous problem—we just didn’t have a good way to get the information necessary to make the right decision—different people had different ideas about what we should do. So we identified the smallest thing we could build that would be useful such that we could get more information from real world use, knowing full well we might have to rebuild something else from the ground up. And we did! But we were able to get the confidence we needed to build the right thing later! And we got there much faster than if we had tried to deliberate and speculate about what that thing would be.

Also, in that saga, one engineer in particular was really adamant that we address his particular set of concerns. He was unable to disagree and commit—he was kind of religious about all concerns being addressed before moving forward with anything. He had a very difficult time understanding that the RFC process existed to meet business goals—the business did not exist to slot into his ideal RFC process. He is no longer with the company.