Why am I still the bottleneck after adding more developers?

I'm trying to figure out if this is just normal early-stage chaos or if other founders hit the same wall.

I started bringing in more help because I needed leverage. We have customers to support, features to ship, bugs to fix, and releases that can't wait on me forever. But even with more developers involved, I still feel like every meaningful change comes back to me before it can ship. The code gets written and the PR gets opened, but then I’m back in the middle explaining why the change matters, what the product was supposed to do, what existing behavior can’t break, and whether the change is actually safe to ship.

So the bottleneck didn’t really disappear. It just changed shape. Instead of writing all the code myself, I’m spending time reviewing decisions, catching missed assumptions, explaining context, and making sure changes fit the product before they reach customers. We already have tickets, docs, Slack, PRs, and review tools. They all help in pieces, but I still end up stitching the picture together when something important moves through the team.

For founders, CTOs, or founding engineers who have been through this:

Did adding more developers actually reduce your load, or did the work just move into review, explanation, and cleanup?
Where do you still have to step in personally: onboarding, implementation, PR review, QA, release prep, or somewhere else?
What context keeps getting lost even when the team is using tickets, docs, Slack, PRs, or whatever process you have?

Is this just part of growing a team, or did it become a recurring drag on shipping?

I'm not looking for tool recommendations. I’m trying to understand whether small teams with an existing product still have a context problem that never really gets solved, no matter how many point solutions get added around it.