A team at a large enterprise spent half a day trying to adjust a simple rule in their staging environment. Not because the change was risky, but because the person who needed to make it didn’t have the right permissions.
Three messages, two tickets, and one Slack reminder later, the update finally went through. The test that should have started in the morning began only by the evening.
Nothing was technically difficult; the process was.
This everyday slowdown is exactly what Open Access solves.
Open Access provides product and engineering teams room to move without compromising control. It replaces rigid bottlenecks and risky shortcuts with a clear operating model where speed and safety work together, not against each other.
The outcome is simple. Teams move faster, and leaders stay confident.
What is Open Access?
Open Access is an environment-level setting inside VWO Feature Experimentation that removes unnecessary permissions for low-risk spaces.
When an environment is marked as Open Access, any user on the platform can create changes and start rules there. No approvals or dependency loops.
Teams get frictionless collaboration in dev and staging, while production remains fully governed with existing permissions intact.
In practice, it enables teams to create, manage, and launch experiments without relying on central teams for every step, and without compromising production.
You can think of it as self-service experimentation with built-in guardrails.
How it works
Open Access is built on three practical layers.
Environment-by-environment flexibility
You choose which environments should be open and which should stay restricted. Development and staging often benefit from being open, while production stays protected.
Autonomy where it’s safe
Designers, PMs, engineers, analysts, and growth teams move independently in non-critical environments, making experimentation cycles faster with zero overhead.
Governance where it matters
Open Access doesn’t relax controls in production or compliance-sensitive environments. Your highest-risk areas remain fully permission-bound.
Who it is for
Open Access is built for organizations where:
- Multiple teams collaborate across several environments
- Access requests create bottlenecks
- Experimentation needs to move faster
- Production and compliance environments must stay secure
It is designed for teams that feel caught between speed and safety:
- Product leaders who want faster learning cycles
- Platform engineers who are responsible for stability
- Security and compliance teams that need visibility
- Growth teams running frequent experiments
What teams gain
With Open Access, organizations shift from permission-heavy workflows to clean, efficient collaboration. They gain:
- Faster build-test-iterate cycles
- Immediate self-service for safe environments
- Fewer tickets and fewer blockers
- A clear separation between collaborative spaces and controlled production
- A calmer release rhythm
It’s a practical way to accelerate experimentation without compromising structure. Teams using Open Access move away from fragile release processes and towards a cleaner, calmer way of working. Instead of choosing between velocity and safety, teams get both.
Get started
Open Access is now available inside VWO Feature Experimentation.
You can enable it from your environment settings and begin configuring permissions and approval flows.
If you would like to see how this works in your setup, your VWO account team can walk you through it.
