Assigning Tasks in Flows: A Guide to Assign Strategy

Introduction

Almost every step in a Chamelio flow eventually needs a person to do something — fill in a field, review a negotiation, sign a document, or approve content before it moves forward. Whenever a step needs a human in the loop, you'll find an assignment control that determines who that person is. One option you can choose is to Assign Strategy: instead of hardcoding one person's name into your flow, you define a rule for how the assignee should be picked, and Chamelio applies that rule every time the flow runs. This article covers what assigning means in Chamelio, the assignment options you'll see throughout the builder, and exactly where Assign Strategy is available.

What "assigning" means in Chamelio

Every flow run creates a task, and that task always has an assignee — the person currently responsible for taking the next action. As a flow moves through its steps, the assignee can change: the person who fills out a Collect form isn't necessarily the person who reviews the Negotiate step or signs the final document. Wherever a step exposes an assignment field, you're deciding who that step's task lands with. Leaving a field on Unassigned means the task sits in a shared queue until someone claims it; setting a specific rule means Chamelio routes it automatically.

The "Assign to…" menu

Anywhere you can assign a step, clicking the assignment field opens the same core menu, though a couple of options only appear on steps where they make sense:

Unassigned leaves the task unowned until someone picks it up manually. User Assign lets you hardcode one specific teammate as the owner — useful when a step should always go to the same person regardless of context. Role based assignment routes the task based on the flow itself rather than a fixed person, with two roles available: Owner (whoever is set as the task's overall owner) and Requester (whoever originally submitted the intake). From Flow lets you pull the assignee dynamically from an earlier variable, such as a field collected at intake. Assign strategy is the option this article focuses on — it opens a second menu of smart routing rules described below.

The four Assign Strategies

Selecting Assign strategy reveals up to four routing rules, depending on the step:

Round Robin cycles through a list of users or groups you specify, handing each new task to the next person in line so work is distributed evenly and in order.

Group with default starts with one default assignee who normally handles the work, while additional users are added as a backup pool who can also pick up or act on the task if needed.

By Workload looks at everyone in your selected pool of users or groups and assigns the new task to whichever person currently has the lightest load, keeping work balanced based on real capacity rather than a fixed rotation.

By Prompt hands the decision to Chamelio's Agent. Instead of picking users manually, you write plain-language Instructions (for example, describing how to route by region, contract type, or deal size), and the agent selects the appropriate assignee at runtime. This option is only available on step-level assignment fields, not on the workflow-wide default.

Where you can use Assign Strategy

Workflow Settings. Every flow has a default task owner, set from the gear icon under Ownership → Users. This controls who gets assigned when a task is created and no step-level rule overrides it. Here Assign Strategy offers Round Robin, Group with Default, and By Workload (no By Prompt at this level, since there's no specific context yet to reason about).

Collect. The Assign to… field determines who receives and fills in the collection request.

Negotiate. The Review Assignee field decides who owns the negotiation round. All four strategies apply, and you can go further by clicking Add condition to build an "Assignee will review if…" rule — for example, routing high-value contracts to one reviewer and everything else to another, with a final Else fallback assignee.

Sign. The Signatures coordinator field controls who creates and manages the signing envelope. The same four strategies are available, so, for instance, envelope coordination could rotate through a legal ops team with Round Robin.

Approval. Each approver group under Select Approvers can be assigned with a strategy instead of naming people directly, which is useful when approvals should be spread across a team or routed by workload rather than always landing on one manager.

Agent (Human Approval). When you turn on Human Approval for an Agent step, the reviewer field that appears uses the same assignment menu, including all four strategies — so even AI-generated output can be routed to a reviewer dynamically.

Customization. This is the one exception worth calling out: the Assignee attribute in a Customization step only supports a static Value (pick one person) or From Flow (pull a variable). Assign Strategy isn't available here, since this step is meant to directly set a fixed property rather than route a live task.

Tips for using Assign Strategy well

Reach for Round Robin when the work is interchangeable and you mainly want fair rotation. Use Group with Default when one person should usually own the work but you want a safety net if they're unavailable. Choose By Workload when task volume is uneven and you want the system to self-balance. Save By Prompt for cases where the right assignee genuinely depends on the content of the request — region, contract type, risk level — and would otherwise require a Condition step just to route people. And remember that Assign Strategy pairs well with Add condition on steps like Negotiate: you can combine a routing rule with explicit business logic rather than choosing one or the other.