You probable know I find most meetings a total waste of time.
But accessibility governance meetings hold a special place in my heart and not in a good way.
If your approach to accessibility begins with a steering group, a new approval step or a 12-page document, I guarantee your product team will find a way to quietly work around it.
All that is busy work for them when they're trying to ship. They're not being reckless either. They just find all that a total waste of time.
But good governance removes repeated decisions. It helps them know what they can decide themselves, what already has an answer they can use and when they need help.
It's this difference between control and clarity that I want to talk to you about.
Control slows you down. Clarity helps you move with confidence.
If you have to keep deciding how accessibility fits into planning, design review, QA and release decisions, you'll get inconsistency. Sometimes, you'll do careful work. Sometimes, you'll miss obvious things. You'll reinvent the same process you solved months ago.
That's wasteful and expensive.
Good governance takes those repeated questions and puts them all in a shared place for everyone's benefit.
What does "done" mean for accessibility? Where should risks be raised? Who makes the call when there is a trade-off? Which patterns should your team reuse instead of inventing again?
These answers should make delivery easier, not heavier. If governance creates another place to ask for permission, it will fail.
But if it helps your team make better decisions without waiting for you, it's doing its job.