You probably don’t lose velocity because your engineers write slow code.
You lose it in the blank space after a spec is written but before anyone actually signs off.
Atlassian’s State of Teams 2025 report puts the hard number on it: roughly 25 percent of every work-week disappears into searching Slack threads, hunting Google Docs links, and ping-ponging Jira tickets. Add UC Irvine’s classic “23-minute refocus” research and you get a costly picture of brains constantly rebooting, not building.
Yet few road-maps call out “approval lag” as a feature blocker.
The hidden cost of sign-off lag
Google’s DORA research links strong documentation practices to up to 25% higher team productivity. But if a spec still needs eight approvals, spread across half a dozen tools, the “strong documentation” badge is meaningless.
Every stalled comment thread or missing sign-off does three things simultaneously:
- Kills flow-state (context switching).
- Extends cycle time (untracked waiting).
- Adds rework (multiple “final” versions).
The kicker: companies already pay for more SaaS than they use. Zylo’s 2024 data shows 47–53% of seats sit idle, so the very stack designed to help collaboration often becomes the bottleneck.
Why legacy tool stacks fail
Docs live in Notion or Confluence. Feedback lives in Slack. Jira stores links to both. Email lurks in the background for “FYI.” None of those apps were built for an approval workflow, they’re built for content, chat, project tickets, and mail. The moment a spec needs a decisive “yes,” the process turns into detective work:
- Who read it?
- Who’s blocking?
- Which version are we even looking at?
Because no single tool owns that question, nobody does.
What a modern document approval workflow looks like
A true document approval workflow flips the script:
- One canonical doc – live, not copy-pasted.
- Built-in sign-off lanes – reviewer, approver, FYI.
- CRM-style stakeholder pane that shows who’s read, approved, or stalled.
- Automated nudges (no more Slack chasing).
- Velocity analytics – median approval time, longest blocker, percent on-time docs.
The moment everyone can see the lag, half the battle is won.
Implementation roadmap (keep it simple)
- Audit — list doc types, stakeholders, baseline cycle time.
- Pilot — migrate one high-impact spec to a dedicated approval workspace.
- Roll out — extend to PRDs, RFCs, discovery docs once metrics improve.
- Optimize — automate reminders, set service-level targets for reviewers.
Teams that follow this path routinely report faster ship cycles and a measurable drop in “Where’s the latest version?” pings.
Key takeaway
Docs aren’t the bottleneck. The invisible approval layer is. Modernizing that layer with purpose-built approval workflow software delivers the single source of truth, stakeholder accountability, and velocity data product teams have been missing—no extra meetings required.\