notification-strategy-review

name

notification-strategy-review

description

Design or audit one cross-channel notification policy across push, email, in-app messages, SMS, browser, and desktop: permission and consent, preferences, taxonomy, trigger semantics, channel routing, frequency and fatigue, privacy, dedupe, deliverability, withdrawal, and observed zero-send. Use when those message-wide controls are the primary artifact. For one win-back, lifecycle-push, offer, event, or promotion campaign's objective, audience, eligibility, economics, fulfillment, and shutdown, use promotion-campaign-review.

Notification Strategy Review

Use this skill to make notifications useful enough to deserve attention.

Atomic boundary

Own one cross-channel Notification Policy artifact: taxonomy, user value, permission/consent/preferences, channel priority, frequency/fatigue, suppression/dedupe, privacy/redaction, deliverability, event schema, incident readback, and measurement. Do not own the whole retention strategy, one offer, one daily loop, or provider implementation.

Use a draft artifact ID and consume sibling decisions by owner and explicit contract. Let deterministic delivery tooling seal serialized versions and digests later; never invent them during design.

Agent-first invariant

Construct the complete policy and the provider adapters, preference states, region/age modes, templates, dedupe, caps, quiet hours, deliverability, observability, support, and kill switches for every selected/applicable channel now. Do not build adapters for undeclared channels or providers. Separate construction from send authority. A dormant channel initializes no SDK, requests no permission, collects no identifier, and sends no message. Unknown/stale authority disables the affected send.

Workflow

1. Identify channel, user lifecycle stage, product promise, message objective, user intent, region, consent state, preference state, content sensitivity, audience role, and fatigue risk.
2. Read references/notification-strategy-patterns.md.
3. Classify messages by utility, urgency, consent, lifecycle trigger, frequency, fallback channel, and failure risk.
4. Build lifecycle, consent/region, privacy/redaction, role/severity, and suppression matrices before proposing campaigns.
5. Define an explicit frequency budget: global cap, category cap, lifecycle-event cap, quiet-hours behavior, cooldown, digest threshold, and emergency override rule.
6. Define deterministic cross-channel dedupe with dedupe_key, channel priority, success stop condition, support/billing stop condition, stale-event expiry, and suppression reason.
7. If notifications are already causing fatigue, complaints, opt-outs, or support contacts, produce an incident readback before adding sends: cohort × channel × lifecycle event × consent state × frequency bucket × complaint/unsubscribe/support signal.
8. Design permission timing, preferences, fallback, measurement, support recovery, and experiment guardrails.
9. Define withdrawal before activation: stop new eligibility, cancel queued or provider-scheduled sends where supported, expire all remaining work, drain callbacks, reconcile provider/internal state, and prove observed zero-send.
10. Produce a notification taxonomy, lifecycle journey map, channel/frequency policy, suppression rules, consent/preference model, incident/readback plan, event schema, and trust metrics.

When not to use

• Use daily-reward-and-streak-review when the primary artifact is the return loop state machine; notifications are only its delivery intent.
• Use promotion-campaign-review for one offer/event audience, economics, fulfillment, and rollback system.
• Use marketing-automation-blueprint for the whole multi-channel acquisition, lifecycle, creative, spend, attribution, and shutdown operating system.
• Use app-design-blueprint or game-design-blueprint when notification semantics depend on unresolved whole-product value and progression.

Source verification

Retrieve current push/browser/email/SMS/desktop platform, consent, marketing, transactional/security, child/age, privacy, sensitive-content, unsubscribe, sender/deliverability, and territory authority at execution. Static text is a route, not a compliance verdict.

Guardrails

• Do not use notifications to compensate for weak product value.
• Do not mix transactional, security, marketing, and engagement consent.
• Give users controls, quiet hours, and clear unsubscribe paths.
• Do not send duplicate push/email/in-app messages for the same lifecycle event unless escalation value is explicit.
• Do not ask platform push permission before the user has seen a concrete notification value moment.
• Do not repeatedly ask after denial; use in-product education, preference-center recovery, and a user-initiated path back to OS/browser settings.
• Do not optimize opens/clicks without delivery, opt-out, unsubscribe, complaint, retention, and long-term trust guardrails.
• Do not describe fatigue management as "cap frequency" without naming concrete global, category, lifecycle-event, cooldown, and digest rules.
• Do not use emergency override for marketing, habit nudges, win-back, IAP promotions, daily rewards, energy reminders, leaderboard resets, or live-event urgency. Reserve it for security, safety, service continuity, or explicit user-requested exact reminders, and log the override reason.
• Do not continue a sequence after the user converts, cancels, pays, resolves the workflow, contacts support, unsubscribes, or complains.
• Do not expose secrets, health/finance details, precise location, private message content, or sensitive account state in lock-screen previews, push payloads, SMS bodies, or email subjects; use auth-gated deep links for details.
• Do not infer consent across channels or categories; email, SMS, push, in-app, desktop/browser, transactional, and marketing controls must stay separate.
• Do not call a channel dormant merely because new scheduling stopped. Cancel provider queues, expire uncancellable work, suppress retries/fallbacks, reconcile delivery callbacks, and observe zero sends through the bounded drain window.

Output format

Notification objective:
Channels:

Lifecycle matrix:
| Lifecycle state | Trigger | User value | Channel priority | Consent/preference state | Frequency/suppression | Metric |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |

Consent and regional control matrix:
| Channel/region | Permission timing | Required consent/preference | Unsubscribe/opt-out | Fallback if denied | Evidence |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |

Privacy/redaction and deep-link policy:
| Content type | Sensitive fields to exclude | Lock-screen/subject/SMS copy | Deep-link auth | Support-safe evidence |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |

Role/severity routing:
| Audience role | Severity | Allowed channels | Escalation | Audit/owner |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |

Taxonomy and channel policy:
- <message type> -> trigger, user value, channel, priority, frequency, control, suppression/dedupe rule

Frequency and suppression budget:
- Global cap:
- Category caps:
- Lifecycle-event cap:
- Cooldowns:
- Digest/quiet-hours rules:
- Emergency override:

Cross-channel dedupe and stop rules:
| Lifecycle event | Dedupe key | Priority order | Stop condition | Suppression reason | Owner |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |

Provider withdrawal and drain:
| Channel/provider | Stop-new authority | Queued/scheduled cancellation | Expiry/dead-letter | Callback reconciliation | Zero-send observation | Owner |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |

Withdrawal state:
- active -> withdrawing -> provider_cancelled_or_expired -> callbacks_reconciled -> observed_zero_send -> dormant
- <failure/timeout> -> quarantined, owner, evidence, recovery action

Preference and recovery model:
| Consent/preference state | Allowed action | Recovery path | Prohibited action | Evidence |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |

Fatigue/incident readback, when applicable:
| Cohort | Channel | Lifecycle event | Frequency bucket | Harm signal | Decision | Owner |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |

Risks and guardrails:
- <risk> -> <guardrail>

Events and trust metrics:
- <event> with channel, category, trigger_event, consent_state, preference_state, suppression_reason, dedupe_key, delivered/opened/dismissed/unsubscribed/complaint/retention outcome

Completion check

Complete only when every lifecycle event has value, authority, priority, dedupe/suppression, privacy, cap, stop, degradation, support, metric, and owner; denial/opt-out and emergency override are tested; and all channels can be disabled without a client release, with provider queues drained or expired and observed zero-send readback.