Feature flag changes are not the only production changes that need governance. Experiments do, too.
Every experiment has the potential to change a user’s experience, shift traffic, affect business metrics, or influence a product decision. For teams operating in regulated environments—or any organization with strict change management practices—that makes review and accountability essential.
That’s why we’re introducing Experiment Approvals, now available in beta. Experiment Approvals extends LaunchDarkly approval workflows to experimentation, giving teams a governed way to start, modify, stop, and ship experiments with the right review in place.
The result: more control over experimentation without slowing down the teams responsible for learning fast.
More end-to-end control
Experimentation is one of the most powerful tools a product team can wield. It turns gut feelings into evidence and feature launches into learning opportunities. And for teams already using LaunchDarkly approval workflows for flag changes, it's always made sense to extend that same level of oversight to experiments—the moments when traffic allocation, variant configurations, and key metrics are on the line.
With Experiment Approvals, organizations now have a safeguard to help ensure best practices are upheld. For teams operating under compliance requirements, internal change management policies, or strict audit obligations, this means LaunchDarkly can cover the full picture. Not just flags, but every experiment that touches production.
For regulated industries, this is especially meaningful. Dual-control requirements, self-approval restrictions, and audit trail mandates apply to production changes of all kinds. Experiment Approvals helps ensure LaunchDarkly meets those requirements end-to-end.
What Experiment Approvals does
Experiment Approvals works just like flag approvals, applied to your entire experimentation workflow. If you already have flag approvals enabled, you're nearly set up. For everyone else, an Admin can turn it on at the environment level.
Here's what it covers:
Starting an experiment requires approval before traffic is allocated to variants. Experiment creators submit the experiment for review, select approvers, add context, and wait for sign-off before anything goes live.
Stopping an experiment or shipping a variation follows the same pattern. Whether you're ending a test early or rolling out a winning variant, that action can require explicit approval, giving your team visibility into every significant change before it affects users.
Modifying a running experiment—changes that would initiate a new iteration—also can require approval. Approvers see a clear diff of what's changing, including both the experiment configuration and the associated flag-targeting rules, so decisions are made with key context.
A centralized approvals interface gives reviewers a single place to see pending requests, review change details, and approve or decline. Notifications land in the LaunchDarkly inbox via email and Slack. Additional integrations are planned.
Audit log integration captures every approval request, decision, and application, including who requested it and who approved it. Self-approval prevention is configurable for organizations that require it.
Built for the agentic future
LaunchDarkly has been investing in making our platform accessible to AI agents, and experimentation will be a key part of that journey. That future is exciting, but it introduces a new set of governance challenges.
Experiment Approvals is the foundation that makes agentic experimentation safer. When an agent proposes a large traffic ramp, launches an experiment on a sensitive surface, or makes a change that crosses a risk threshold, the approval workflow is designed so that a human stays in the loop. Low-risk, routine actions can move quickly. Higher-stakes changes route through review.
We're building toward a policy-based model where organizations can define which agent actions require human approval and which can proceed automatically. Experiment Approvals is step one.
Learn more about approvals here.
Get access to Experiment Approvals
Experiment Approvals is available in beta to all customers with LaunchDarkly Experimentation. If you’re interested in getting access to try it out, please contact us.
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