Named, and set up front. The person who asked for the work owns the next step. I added an “approver” field that takes more than one person, because a change often touched more than one side of the business. For changes that didn’t touch sales, it was often just our product owner testing and signing off.

Then I tried to make saying yes as easy as possible:

An automatic comment tags the approvers as soon as the work hits our own testing, so they know it’s coming before it lands on them. Every piece of work carries its release steps, including the quick checks needed for sign-off. Those get tested on the way up, so we can hand them straight to the approver instead of a vague “please test.” We even tried short screen-share videos of the change, so people could approve without logging in at all.

A name on it means it isn’t a hand-off scramble. Making it easy for that person is what gets it unstuck.

The hard part: not everyone lives in our ticketing system. Sales works in their own tools, so reminders moved to Slack, and then the status got split across two places. I’m still working on that one.