Priority Routing
Priority routing means delivering notifications based on how urgent or important a message actually is, rather than treating every message from a subscribed channel identically — so a critical alert and a routine update don't compete for the same attention.
Channel-membership-based notification — "you're in this channel, so you get notified of everything in it" — doesn't distinguish urgency from volume. A person subscribed to a busy channel gets the same interruption treatment for a critical incident and a scheduling update, which either means the important item gets lost in noise, or the whole channel has to be muted, losing the important item entirely.
Priority routing instead assigns each message (or message type) a severity, and delivery behavior follows the severity rather than the subscription alone: low-severity items batch into a digest, normal items get a standard notification, high-severity items get a more prominent one, and critical items are allowed to break through quiet hours and other suppression rules by policy.
The policy needs to be explicit and narrow about what qualifies as high enough priority to interrupt — otherwise "priority routing" degenerates back into "everything is urgent," which is the exact problem it was meant to solve. A small, well-defined set of message types (a genuine alert, an assigned approval, a direct mention) is usually the right scope for what's allowed to break through.
Priority Routing, in the product
In aanty, typed alert and approval messages can break quiet hours by policy — a covenant breach, a sev-1 incident, an assigned approval with a deadline — while everything else respects them. The rule is deterministic and stated up front, not something AI decides case by case.
Related terms and pages
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