Approver chains: who signs off on what

An approver chain is a small org chart for autonomous work. Designed badly it becomes a bottleneck; designed well it disappears into the background.

Every output an agent produces lands somewhere — an inbox, a CRM, a published page, a customer's screen. The approver chain decides who is the last human in that path, and on what conditions they get pulled in.

Three patterns we see

Single approver — one person batches and signs. Fast, fragile when they are out.
Function-routed — copy goes to marketing, finance to ops, escalations to a partner. Most teams land here.
Risk-tiered — only flagged items leave the loop. Highest leverage; needs good flagging.

Tie the chain to the autonomy dial: tier-three roles bypass approvers for routine output and only surface exceptions. Otherwise you have re-built a manual workflow with extra steps.