Email validation and compliance workflow

Every lifecycle email required four to five rounds of review between the lifecycle team and Compliance before it could send. No self-serve QA existed, so every send was a back-and-forth that added days to production.

The original request was a spam checker — something to flag obvious deliverability risks before content went to Compliance. I built the first version. It worked technically. The output was inconsistent.

I looked at why. The workflow was checking for spam signals. Compliance wasn’t reviewing for spam signals — they were reviewing for specific regulatory language, prohibited claims, and jurisdiction-specific disclosure rules. The tool was solving the wrong problem because I hadn’t brought the actual subject matter expert into the design.

Stop iterating on the technical layer and redesign the workflow from the compliance review process outward. Bring Compliance in as a design partner, not a downstream approver.

Rebuilding from scratch rather than patching the existing workflow cost time upfront, but it was the only path to something the team would actually rely on.

Compliance review cycles per email. How many rounds of back-and-forth before sign-off? That was the friction the tool was supposed to remove. If the number didn’t drop, the tool wasn’t working regardless of what it produced technically.

Sat with Compliance before touching the workflow. Documented exactly how they reviewed content: what they looked for, what triggered a flag, what the rules were per content category, what varied by jurisdiction. Built that logic into the prompt architecture and validation layer.

It took four versions. V1 checked spam signals — functional, wrong problem. V2 added compliance flag categories: better output, still inconsistent, because the model was interpreting rules rather than applying them. V3 brought Compliance in and replaced interpretation with explicit rule sets — reliable, but too verbose to use. V4 restructured the output so results were actionable in seconds.

Built in n8n so the lifecycle team could run validation themselves while drafting. Compliance reviews the output, not the email. The compliance question was answered before the email ever reached Compliance.