Recently, in a team meeting, we discussed Confluence approvals far and wide, mentioning complex use cases, company policies, and long approval chains. It all brought me back to a fairly simple topic, but one that almost always experiences some form of a bottleneck: writing a piece of content is finished, but the work still isn't moving.
A chat message saying “Can you check this when you have a minute?” feels optional. A comment saying “@John thoughts?” has no clear deadline or outcome. And I've always struggled to find the right way to get people to react to my content faster without being too annoying with constant reminders. The picture usually looks like this:
Draft → ask someone to review → wait → remind them → wait → ask again → receive scattered feedback → make changes → ask “are we good now?” 🫠
Which makes 100% of the people who try to collaborate grumpy (me the most).
Also, I have never experienced the need for “formal approval” of the content I write. Yes, of course, nothing will go out without final confirmation from the peer who reviews, but it was nothing more than a page thumbs-up or a Slack message. Maybe that was why I somehow didn't see the value of Confluence approvals at first. But having a formal approval request creates an explicit responsibility: this content is waiting for your decision.
“Can you take a look?” is surprisingly easy to ignore
When I send someone: “Hey, when you have time, could you check this page?” I’ve accidentally communicated that there is no urgency, no defined responsibility, and possibly no specific action required.
The reviewer has to figure out:
- What exactly am I reviewing?
- Does Teodora actually need my approval or just my opinion?
- How urgently does she need it?
- What happens after I review it?
- Do I need to tell her when I’m done?
And because everyone has their own Jira work items, meetings, messages, and deadlines, that vague request sinks to the bottom of the priority list.
What changes when approval becomes part of the workflow?
This is one of the things I started looking at differently after working with Approval Path for Confluence at Warsaw Dynamics. The interesting part for me wasn't simply adding an Approve button to a Confluence page. It was what happened when the review stopped being an informal favor and became an actual step in the workflow.
Before
Writer → message reviewer → hope → chase → interpret response → publish
With an approval workflow
Writer → submit/request approval → reviewer has an explicit action → approve/reject → writer knows the status → move forward
The page hasn't changed. The expectation has.
Formal doesn't have to mean complex
The goal isn’t to create a governance process that requires six signatures before someone can publish a social media post. It’s often just making sure that Peter would confirm that this technical statement is correct before it goes live.
That matters even more when several pieces of content are moving at once. One page may be waiting for Product, another for Marketing, another for a final sign-off. Without a clear workflow, all of that status lives in my head, in chat messages, or in browser tabs I’m afraid to close.
By using customized and polished approvals in Confluence, we framed our content writing process into a simple rule:
Discuss in comments. Collaborate on the page. Decide through an approval.
Content workflows don't usually break because people refuse to review our work. More often, the review request competes with dozens of other things that seem more concrete and urgent.
Turning “could you take a look?” into an explicit approval doesn't magically give people more time. It does something simpler: it makes the responsibility and the next action clear. And for a content writer, that can mean spending considerably less time chasing work and more time actually creating it.
If you want to learn more about how Approval Path works, check it out on the Atlassian Marketplace. I recently updated all the Marketplace content myself - and, fittingly enough, those reviews moved rather quickly. 🤭
