I think you miss the point. In Git (and Bazaar), you're working with your own branches locally. You don't have to tell anyone that you've made them. Once you're happy with your experimentations in one branch and want to merge it into the "trunk", you can then either tell your team leader, "Hey, I've finished this new feature, pull from me", or depending on your rights, push it straight into the main repository. That's the beauty of distributed SCM's. You're the only one who has to juggle those balls. If you're able to juggle 10, then fine. If you're like me and can only deal with 1 or 2, that's fine too. The point is, it's your own repository. You can make as many or few branches as you like and nobody has to know.