Acknowledge & resolve

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Each change card supports two state-transition actions: Acknowledge and Resolve. They have similar names but distinct meanings.

Acknowledge

Acknowledging a change records that someone has reviewed it. The change is no longer unowned, even though the work it implies may not yet be complete.

Use Acknowledge when:

You have read the change but have not yet decided on a course of action.
The investigation will take time, and you want the rest of the team to know it is being handled.
A different teammate will perform the actual fix, and you want to indicate it has been routed.

Acknowledged changes remain visible in the Open tab until they are resolved. The acknowledgement timestamp and acknowledger are recorded on the change.

Resolve

Resolving a change records that the work it implies is complete.

Use Resolve when:

The code change has shipped, or the deprecation has been accepted.
After investigation, you have determined that the change does not affect your usage.
No further action is appropriate.

Resolved changes move to the Resolved tab, where they remain available for audit and historical reference. They are excluded from the Open queue but are not deleted.

Worked example

A breaking change is detected on Stripe's /customers endpoint. The team becomes aware of it through a Slack alert at 9:00 AM.

9:00 AM — An engineer reviews the diff in the change card and confirms it is a real impact. The engineer acknowledges the change so the rest of the team knows it is being handled.
9:30 AM — The engineer who owns the billing service inspects the affected code and opens a pull request.
2:00 PM — The pull request ships. The engineer returns to the change card and selects Resolve.

The result is a complete record of the response: who saw the change first, when it was acknowledged, and when the fix was deployed.

Bulk handling

If a backlog has accumulated — for example, after a holiday or extended absence — the Incidents list supports selecting multiple incidents and applying Acknowledge or Resolve in bulk. Use this judiciously: acknowledging without reading defeats the purpose of the action.