Branch operations work consistently, regardless of whether you use the centralized mode or not.

Although the centralized mode permits multiple collaborators committing unrelated changes continuously in the central branch, it is better to work on new improvements in dedicated feature branches and merge them into the central branch only when they are ready. In this way, the revision history remains easy to read, and if a feature causes problems, then all the revisions involved in it can be reverted easily with one swift move.

Even in a centralized workflow, you are free to use as many local private branches as needed. You can slice and dice your local branches and when a feature is ready, you can merge them into the central branch, and all the intermediate revisions will be preserved in the history.

Team members can work on a feature branch together by sharing the branch on the central server. One of the team members can start working on the feature, and at some point push the branch on the server so that others can checkout from it and start contributing their work. After pushing the branch to the server, the original contributor can switch to the centralized mode using the bind command.