Every operational product eventually gets the same question from a customer: who changed this, and when? It arrives late, usually during a procurement review, and it is expensive to answer if you did not plan for it.
We used to treat that as a per-product feature. HRMS grew an activity log. InsuraVault needed a stricter one for regulatory reasons. Lever Today's audit history was really its core object rather than a side table. Three products, three schemas, three answers to the same question, and no way to reason about any of them together.
The platform owns the mechanism. The product owns the meaning.
Attribution is now part of the shared foundation. A product declares which records are auditable; the platform handles capture, retention and query. What a product still owns is what the entries mean. An approval in Lever Today reads differently from a policy endorsement in InsuraVault, and that framing is product work, not platform work.
The line we settled on: the platform owns the mechanism, the product owns the meaning. It has held for notifications and reporting too, which is a reasonable sign it is the right seam.
