Roles are workspace-defined labels — like "Reviewer", "Finance Approver", or "Regional Lead" — that act as dynamic placeholders for real people in a workflow. Instead of hardcoding a specific person into a task, you assign a Role. The right person is resolved at runtime based on who holds that Role in your workspace.
How Roles work
Roles are defined in your workspace settings and assigned to team members. When a workflow runs, MergePoint looks up who holds that Role and routes the task to them.
This means one workflow can serve multiple teams, regions, or departments — the Role adapts to the data.
Assigning tasks using Roles
Assignment is configured in the Task Assignment node on the canvas. Three modes are available:
| Mode | What it does |
|---|---|
| Role | Assigns to everyone who holds that workspace Role |
| People | Assigns to specific named team members |
| From workflow | Assigns to a user resolved from a prior step's output (e.g. a lookup result or form field value) |
When you use Role or From workflow mode, completion is automatically set to At the same time (parallel), since the assignee resolves at runtime.
When you use People, you can choose:
- One at a time — each person receives the task in sequence
- At the same time — all assignees receive the task simultaneously
Fallback behaviour
If no assignee resolves at runtime, the task falls back to one of two behaviours:
- Catch-all — route to a specific backup person or Role
- Fail — fail the workflow step, with an optional notification email
Configure this in the Fallback section of the Task Assignment node.
Roles in automation steps (Run As)
For automation steps — like sending an email or calling an API — you can set the step to Run As a specific Role. The action executes using that user's connected account (e.g. sending from their Gmail inbox).
The assigned user must have already connected the relevant integration, or the step will fail.