Review flow: when more than one manager reviews

Compass’s review posture is a single review pass per PR plus the human’s final merge gate. When more than one Manager has a stake in a PR, a UX question follows: does the PR need every interested Manager to approve, or one approval plus comments from the rest? This doc records the question and the current posture; it is a product/review-flow convention, not a frozen mechanism.

The two shapes

• All approve. Each interested Manager must post an approval before the PR is considered review-clean. Strongest signal — every stakeholder has actually looked — but it serializes on the slowest reviewer and can deadlock if one is unavailable.
• One approves, others comment. One Manager’s approval clears the review gate; the other stakeholders leave comments (blocking or not) but are not each required to approve. Faster and deadlock-free, at the cost of a weaker “everyone looked” guarantee — a comment is not an approval, and a stakeholder who only comments has not signed off.

Current posture

The human is always the final merge gate, regardless of how many Managers review — an agent approval is a “review passed” signal, never the merge itself. So the multi-Manager question is only about the review-clean signal that precedes the human gate, not about who merges (the human, always).

The default today is one approval clears the review gate: the single review pass per PR produces the review-clean signal, other stakeholders comment, and the human merges having seen the whole thread. The “all approve” shape is available as a stricter convention a lane can adopt when a change genuinely needs every stakeholder’s explicit sign-off — but it is opt-in, not the default, precisely because the default must not deadlock on an unavailable reviewer.

Open — the UX is not settled

Which shape should be the product default (and whether the UI should make the choice per-PR, per-lane, or per-repo) is an open review-flow UX question, parked here rather than decided. It is deliberately separate from forge account identity: whether an agent’s approval “counts” is a review-flow / product question, not a question about which forge account the agent uses. Record a decision here when the product flow settles it; until then the one-approval default above is what ships.