[derefr]

> Immediately, people started to express strong opinions in favor or against it. We had a full-company sitdown to talk about it, but it was really weird because it was all just hypotheticals. Ultimately, we burned a lot of time on it, and the deal was kind of dead in the water due to this approach.

This sounds like the sort of problem you solve with a policy, not by breaking the enabling technology. What about just telling your employees that nascent partnerships—like nascent microservices—start out "owned" by the people exploring them, and everyone can observe their development, but nobody has an implicit right to have input on them until they get to the "release-candidate" phase?

[gdb]

It's kinda (and in some cases maybe even irresponsible) unfair to drop major things on people without providing more context. The point of email transparency isn't to make everything transparent; it's to increase efficiency. We don't need to cover everything.

Generally with similar initiatives these days we'll talk about them at all-hands, or if they're particularly interesting have a dedicated gathering to discuss them. We also find ways of increasing transparency once the need for secrecy has been removed, such as opening up the list archives post-hoc.