Merges are loud in calendars and quiet in telemetry. Schema renames, container splits, and “temporary” redirects leave scroll sensors pointing at ghosts. Dashboards still render—worse, they look fine while drifting.
We write narrative diffs: prose that walks a reviewer from old tag to new tag with screenshots of the affected components. The prose lives next to CSV extracts so engineers can verify without parsing someone’s memory.
The diff includes a risk-sorted backlog. Not every mismatch deserves a midnight deploy. Some can wait beside copy tweaks; others should block quarterly readouts. Sorting by risk keeps executives from treating hygiene like a moral panic.
Finally, schedule a 30-day check-in. Merges have second waves: the fixes you shipped interact with caches, CDNs, and editorial experiments. A short revisit catches the sneaky ones without turning the project into an endless retainer unless you want that deliberately.