Best practices for building flows

There's no "wrong way" to build a workflow. However, there are best practices you can keep in mind when getting started.

The best flows don't rely on documentation - they replace it. 

Creating good flows can take time, though not as much as might you think, and the payoff is enormous. Reducing onboarding time, documentation, and retraining by 90% is quite doable.

Maintaining documentation can be challenging as your business needs change with time. And one thing teams like less than reading documentation is writing it. On top of that, updates can often lead to countless emails, meetings, and costly mistakes until your team is up to speed. 

But with flows, whenever changes occur, all you need to do is update the flow and your team immediately follows the new procedures every time.

Break things down to first principles.

Team members use their experience and training if your processes require judgment calls. New admins (flow builders) like yourself sometimes lean on shorthand and company lingo when building the decision steptypes for their teams in these cases. While this may work for experienced team members, it's less helpful for new colleagues. Less is typically more.

Breaking your big decisions into smaller ones - like a simple yes and no - makes the flow easier to follow. It will mean more steps, but you'll save time and money in the long run by reducing errors. Plus, you can always get team members' feedback and make changes down the line.

Automate everything you can.

Many steptypes can run automatically, and almost all steptypes can refer to data available on integrated systems. Use this data to build decision trees that can also automatically select the right option. Automations reduce errors and let your teams whiz through flows rather than relying on them to enter data already available elsewhere. 

Even decision steptypes can be automated and accelerated. Use the 💡 light bulb symbol to make the decisions automatically based on criteria in different systems. We recommend experimenting until you're familiar with it.

Plus, seeing a complicated process boiled down to just a few clicks is so dang satisfying.

Think in modules.

If you have a big problem, don't make a massive workflow to deal with it (if you can). Instead, break the process into chunks that make sense to your team. You can use the Launch and Boomerang steptypes to link them together.

Modules can be more easily updated and iterated upon since they focus on a particular puzzle piece.

For example, suppose you're writing a flow to help guide customers through troubleshooting an app. In that case, you can start with a general flow for identifying the type of problem, an iPhone or Android phone, and then use Boomerang steptypes to jump to a workflow designed to troubleshoot iPhone issues specifically.