Managing flags and experiments with approvals

This article helps you:

Learn how to use the approvals workflows for feature flags and experiments

Improve the governance of your experimentation program and decrease the risk of unintended changes by requiring approvals for critical changes to experiment configuration.

Experiment Approvals is only available to Growth and Enterprise customers.

Setting up approvals

Turn on approvals by going to Organization Settings > Experiment > Approvals.

Only users who have manager or admin roles can modify approvals settings.

Add the individual projects that you would like to require approvals for.

For each project, you can specify one of the following options:

Peer approvals: Any users with access can respond to pending approval requests
Specific approvers: Only the users designated can respond to pending approval requests

Additionally, admin users can respond to pending approvals.

Requesting and responding to approval requests

Requiring approvals to activate flags and experiments

After approvals are enabled for a project, Amplitude recommends that you follow this approval process:

When starting or scheduling an experiment or activating or scheduling a feature flag, the requestor selects one or more approver to notify.
The experiment displays a “Pending Approval” status until it's approved.
Approvers can review the experiment and either approve the requested changes or reject the changes.
The approval or rejection automatically notifies the original requestor of the response.

While the approval is pending, users can make additional changes to the flag or experiment configuration, enter or exit testing mode, or cancel the request at any time.

When the scheduled flag or experiment gains approval, the flag or experiment is considered live and requires approvals for critical changes.

Requiring approvals for critical changes to live flags and experiments

When a flag or experiment is active, certain updates also require approval:

Field	Type of Change
Target Segments	Adding and removing segments, modifying conditions or bucketing.
Variants	Any changes, including adding, renaming or removing variants.
Variant Distribution	Any changes
Exposure Event	Any changes
Bucketing Salt	Any changes
Sticky Bucketing	Enabling / Disabling

When reviewing these approval requests, users can view the full list of changes in the approval banner.

When approvals are pending, the flag or experiment is locked. This prevents users with access from making other changes until the previous approval request is completed or cancelled.