Part 1: Signs Your Approval Process Is a Bottleneck

The Approval Loop Trap: A 3-Part Blog Mini Series 

This post is part of our 3-part series: The Approval Loop Trap.

• Part 1: Signs Your Approval Process Is a Bottleneck

Your team is producing great work, but somehow, everything keeps getting stuck “in review”.

It’s a common problem.

What looks like rigor can actually become an invisible bottleneck that slows delivery, frustrates the team, and drains momentum. Approvals aren’t bad, but unstructured approvals are where projects go to die.

Here are some telltale signs your process is holding you back:

🔁 Too many hand-offs. Work bounces between multiple reviewers, none of whom are the true decision-maker.

📅 Deadlines slide. No one knows when feedback is coming, so work stalls.

📬 Scattered feedback. Slack here, email there, vague comment in the doc, no single source of truth.

🔇 Team morale dips. People feel stuck or demotivated because they’re waiting (again).

🎯 The end product drifts. By the time all the feedback is in, the final deliverable doesn’t match the original vision.

The real issue often starts at the beginning: stakeholders and decision-makers aren’t clearly defined during the briefing process. That means you end up backtracking mid-project, pulling in “new eyes,” and layering on more feedback just when the team thought they were done. Identifying who has true approval power, and who is simply consulted, up front saves weeks of churn later.

Another hard truth: at some point, things need to be locked. If every person can reopen a previously approved deliverable, they will. And the project will never end. Part of the PM’s role is setting the expectation that once something is signed off, it stays signed off, so the team can move forward.

👉 That said, no process is perfect. Sometimes a late-breaking insight truly does warrant revisiting an earlier approval. The key is to make those exceptions intentional:

• If the change is critical, revisit with a clear decision framework and communicate why.
• If it’s a “nice-to-have” but not urgent, capture it for a Phase 2 instead of derailing the current launch.

This balance protects momentum while still leaving room for continuous improvement.

And then there’s the day-to-day reality: approvals don't always happen on autopilot. A PM sometimes has to keep work moving through the pipeline with. Without that steady pressure, approvals stall, deadlines drift, and momentum evaporates.

Approvals should accelerate quality, not strangle it. And it’s the PM’s job to design and protect a process that keeps work flowing, not stuck.

👉 Up next: Why too many eyes on a project can actually hurt clarity, not help it.