Philosophy
Process that scales with trust
Governance tools tend to fail one of two ways: so loose that anything ships, or so strict that people route around them. Stoaken aims between the two. Light process for routine changes, more care where the risk is real, and a clear record of who decided what.
People decide
Design systems are made of judgment calls. Whether a slightly darker green is a fix or a regression is a decision for someone who knows the product.
So automations and AI agents propose, and people approve. Agents connected to Stoaken can read tokens and submit changes, but there is no approve or publish action for them anywhere: not in the agent tools, not in the API.
Show the impact, not just the diff
A one-line change to a base color can move dozens of tokens that reference it, in some modes and not others. A raw diff hides that.
Every release is resolved the way it will ship: aliases followed, brand inheritance applied, every combination of modes worked out. Reviewers see the blast radius in the Token Graph and screenshots of components in each mode.
Review in proportion
Most changes are routine and should be easy to approve. Some are not.
Any Reviewer can approve an ordinary change. A breaking one, like removing a token, needs an Admin. If you are away, you can hand a review to a colleague instead of leaving it waiting.
Honest exceptions
Sometimes a fix cannot wait for review. Pretending otherwise just pushes people to work around the process.
An Admin can publish a release as an exception. It has to have a reason and an expiry date, anything longer than a week needs a migration plan, and it stays listed in the Command Center with its expiry for as long as it is the live release.
Deprecate in the open
Removing a token outright breaks whoever still uses it. Deprecating it first gives them a path.
A deprecation names its replacement and goes through review like any other change. Stoaken lists everything that still references the old token, so the migration has a to-do list.
Nothing happens silently
Reviewers are told when something needs them. You can watch the comment threads you care about and mute the ones you do not.
Other systems can listen too: webhooks announce when a release is submitted, published or rejected. Every release is kept, so you can always see what shipped and when.
Built by people who care about design systems, for the people who run them.
Your AI agents are welcome too. They just don’t get to skip the review.