By partitioning your team such that each member works orthogonally, you are severely handicapping the team's ability to improve the overall design of the projec

By partitioning your team such that each member works orthogonally, you are severely handicapping the team's ability to improve the overall design of the project. Frankly, I would consider such a management strategy to be pretty arrogant, because by locking your team members out of the design process, you are tacitly telling them that your design is so good that their input is unnecessary. That's a great way to sap people's motivation. As for the "couple of potentially unethical guys," what are they doing on your team? They should be fired. Why would you even consider keeping an unethical team member? How could their work output possibly outweigh the fact that they might steal from you, or worse? Hiding the overall design isn't going to stop someone who is very motivated from compromising the system you're designing. To prevent that, I'd start with frequent code reviews and restricting access to production systems.