1. This introduces a lot of process, bureaucracy, and chances of gatekeeping politics. The whole “yes if” mantra just centralizes the political power to the hands of fewer senior leaders by cutting off legitimate blocking criticism from the rank and file.
2. Judge processes by outcomes. What has Squarespace done / shipped / accomplished in the last four or five years? I’m not alone in feeling like it’s a head-scratcher why the company would pay the most senior engineers to erect slow moving bureaucratic decision-by-committee disempowerment structures like this, and then turn around and act like that’s a good thing or constitutes what you’d want to see as productivity from staff or principal engineers.
While I’m a proponent of writing things down, not surprising peer teams, pulling blockers or conflicts forward quickly … I don’t think templates and councils help more than they hurt, and often domain experts in different teams need empowerment to just totally bypass that time-wasting crap and do what needs to be done. If they don’t uphold the responsibility to do due diligence on review or finding conflicts, fire them or take them off the project, but don’t make everyone wear design-by-committee training wheels and act like that’s non-dysfunctional good engineering.
YMMV of course, but I reckon it’s really worth it to ask what is the real engineering output, speed, productivity following from this kind of large process overhead.