Release meetings often open with a wall of graphs and close with a deferred decision. The missing piece is usually a written gate: what must be true, for how long, and who can call hold.
A practical filter: draft the decision sentence first (“We freeze if crash-free sessions drop below X for the canary cohort”). Only then name the events and properties that sentence requires.
Retired gates deserve the same rigor. Mark them deprecated with an owner and a cut date so the next train does not resurrect a metric nobody trusts.
App Dev Sync reviews usually find that freeze debates stall on three chatty screens and one undefined “stability” label — not on a lack of data volume.