✅ Approval Festival 25: A Retrospective

26 Mar

On March 20, I had the opportunity to speak at Approval Fest 25, a fast-paced and insight-packed webinar hosted by the ever-energized Alex Ortiz (Apetech) — a huge YouTube presence in the Atlassian space and a trusted voice for teams navigating Jira, Confluence, and agile best practices. It was an absolute honour to have him host the event, guiding the conversation with curiosity, empathy, and a touch of humour that kept the session both insightful and lively.

This hour-long session brought together developers, marketplace vendors, and thought leaders across the Atlassian ecosystem to dig into one deceptively complex topic: approvals.

We explored where approval workflows thrive, where they break down, and how modern tooling can elevate them from mere gatekeeping to collaborative, traceable decision-making. I joined a fantastic panel alongside folks from Resolution and Warsaw Dynamics, each of us sharing how our teams are tackling approvals in Jira and Confluence in distinct but complementary ways.

How It All Started

When Álex kicked things off (after some timezone confusion and a brief debate over backgrounds—classic Zoom moments), we each introduced how we landed in the world of approvals before answering Alex's pro questions.

🤔 Question 1: Why Build an Approval App?

Álex Ortiz:Why did your company decide to develop an add-on for approval processes?

Our answer: we saw the same messy pattern repeated across teams — approvals happening through Slack messages, forwarded emails, or vague verbal nods. It’s what we came to call "approval spaghetti": disjointed, untracked, and disconnected from the content it’s meant to validate.

This chaos leads to:

🔍 Lost responses
🔄 Outdated versions being approved
🙈 Zero accountability

These aren’t just workflow nuisances — they pose serious compliance risks, especially in regulated industries where documentation integrity matters.

Confluence, for all its strengths as a collaborative space, lacked one critical step: formal approval built into the content layer. So we built Approval for Confluence — not to replace Jira, but to bring structured, document-first approvals directly into Confluence, where the content lives and evolves.

👉 See how to request an approval directly in Confluence

🤨 Question 2: Can’t We Just Use Jira for That?

Álex Ortiz:Just playing devil’s advocate — why can’t people just use Jira for approvals?

You absolutely can — and many do. In fact, several excellent apps showcased at Approval Fest are centered on Jira-based approval workflows.

But we created Approval for Confluence because we saw unique pain points in content-heavy, document-first teams — especially in Marketing, Documentation, and Legal. Here’s why Jira sometimes falls short:

1. Living Content Needs Living Approvals

Unlike tickets or one-off tasks, Confluence pages evolve over time. Approval for Confluence supports version-based approvals — each new version can trigger its own review cycle, keeping decisions aligned with content updates.

👉 Explore version-based approvals

2. Content Divergence Creates Risk

Approving a Confluence page from Jira works… until someone edits the page afterward. Now the Jira ticket reflects an outdated decision.

PDF exports can help, but they introduce new friction: uploading, replacing, tracking. Our approach? Keep approvals on the page and tied to the actual content being signed off.

3. Approvals Should Happen Where Work Happens

Our core product philosophy is reduce context switching. If your team works in Confluence, approvals should happen there too.

That’s why we built features like:

🧭 Approval Dashboard featuring imporant notifications on assigned, requested and expiring soon
✅ One-click approvals from search dashboard — no need to open the page
🔍 Search by approver, status, or date
📜 Full audit logs with comments and timestamps

Our approval dashboard creates a centralized way to easily manage your approvals

👉 How our Approval Dashboard Works

Use our Approval feature in our All-In-One App Capable for COnfluence and enjoy full integration with our search tool

Approvals + Search = a powerful knowledge management tool:

🛡️ Question 3: Accountability Is Not About Blame

Álex Ortiz:Why is accountability essential in approvals, and how can you ensure it?

We’ve all heard it: “I thought I was looking at the right version…”

Accountability, to us, means clarity — not blame. Everyone should know who approved what, when, and why.

With Capable Approval, every action is:

🧾 Logged by user and version
💬 Commented with context
🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Quorum-supported (e.g., 2 out of 5 approvers required)

👉 Learn how quorum rules work

In the session, I emphasized something we’ve seen too often: approvals made through guesswork. Maybe someone thought they were looking at the right draft. Maybe they weren’t sure what they were approving but didn’t want to hold things up.

When the process is unclear, people either hesitate or rush — neither is good for quality or compliance. We designed our tool to eliminate that uncertainty. Approval logs aren’t just for auditing — they help teams collaborate more confidently, knowing that their decisions are tracked, versioned, and traceable.

And here’s the real key: being wrong isn’t the issue. Mistakes happen. But without a proper trail, companies can’t see where the breakdown occurred or how to help that person improve next time. Clear accountability lets teams learn, not blame — and that’s a far more productive, sustainable outcome.

And as for Compliance:

We’ve designed the tool to help companies align with common regulatory requirements, including:

FDA 21 CFR Part 11
ISO 9001
SOC 2
NIST 800-53

If you’re in Life Sciences, Engineering, Legal, or IT, having reliable records of who approved what version — and the rationale behind it — is non-negotiable.

👉 View our compliance documentation →

🛎️ Question 4: Nudges That Work (Without Being Annoying)

Álex Ortiz:How do you balance timely reminders without annoying users?

Let’s be honest — no one wakes up excited to do approvals. That’s why we focused on gentle, targeted nudges:

During the event, I brought up something we all know but rarely say out loud: approvals are nobody’s favorite task. No one says, “Let me grab my coffee and approve a page!” Especially if the request is buried in a 10-email thread or a tool they rarely use.

So we focused on creating frictionless, in-flow reminders. Banners in Confluence pages are visual but non-intrusive — they tell you what’s needed without pinging your inbox into oblivion. Slack and email notifications go to the places people already check, so no extra effort is required to stay in the loop.

Plus, for high-stakes or evergreen content, we included optional expiration rules — a page can “expire” after a certain time, prompting a re-approval to ensure the decision still holds up. This ensures long-living content stays current and compliant without constant manual chasing.

In short: our goal wasn’t just to make approvals easier — it was to make doing the right thing feel natural. No nagging, no noise. Just a clear path to the next decision.

💬 What the Other Teams Shared

We loved hearing how other teams approached approvals — each with a distinct angle:

Warsaw Dynamics took us behind the scenes of their app’s flexible architecture. Their focus? Giving users the power to build truly custom approval flows using modular “paths.” One standout capability is the inclusion of external approvers via email, which is a game-changer for companies needing feedback from clients or executives outside their Jira instance. They also touched on support for quorum approvals, conditions, and API integrations — all designed to mirror complex real-world hierarchies.
Resolution tackled a surprisingly common blocker: what happens when an approver is out of office? Their solution, built around delegation logic and calendar integrations, ensures that no ticket gets stuck just because someone’s traveling, sick, or offline. Their app doesn’t try to replace Jira’s native workflows but enhances them by automating fallback approval routing based on absence — especially helpful in service-heavy teams using JSM.

👉 Watch the full Approval Festival replay here

🛠️ Ready to Level Up Your Approval Game?

If you’re still chasing down sign-offs in Slack, email threads, or dusty spreadsheets, it might be time to level up.

With Approval for Confluence, you’ll get:

✅ Context-aware, in-page approvals
📜 Tamper-proof audit logs
🚦 Smart status banners
🔎 Powerful filtering and dashboards
📬 Integrated Slack + email reminders
🧠 Built-in compliance support

👉 Install Capable Approval Today

Thanks to Álex, Parsa, Jaime, and the whole Approval Fest crew.
Approvals may never be sexy — but when done right, they’re powerful, transparent, and team-enabling.

James Bridge