Customers must be able to model their own change process. They must not be able to switch off the assurance they bought. Both are true at once, and the workflow engine is where they are reconciled.
A Jira-style editor
Approval steps, assignee resolution, quorum, SLA and escalation, authored in an editor rather than requested as configuration work. Publishing validates the result.
A spine that survives publication
Ten gates form a spine that cannot be removed. The editor is additive only: it can make a process stricter than the product’s, never looser. A configuration that would delete, skip or auto-satisfy a spine gate fails validation at publish rather than failing quietly in production six weeks later.
It may end at approval rather than at a merge
Small teams run the full cycle through to merge and release. Large organisations stop at “approved for production” and hand off to the teams who own production, with the approval bound to a commit and an artefact digest.
Most large enterprises will never grant a governance vendor access to a production branch. The product loses nothing by not asking.