flow designer is one of our most popular features for automating work on the now platform and our Washington DC release brings some very nice updates on this episode we have one of the key people in charge of its success before we begin I want to mention that we did have some audio issues with this episode most of what you'll hear is absolutely fine but there are some artifacts here and there we hope this doesn't take away from your enjoyment of this episode of breakpoint welcome to breakpoint the service now developer [Music] podcast hello service now admins Builders developers and of course all of the Curious individuals that I always say with the utmost love and respect we do love you and we do respect you welcome to or welcome back to breakpoint the service now developer podcast where we bring you the latest tools tips and tradecraft to accelerate your career my name is CH tamasi I am a senior developer Advocate at service now and I am joined by the one and only the smart the beautiful I'm running out of adjectives cuz there's just too many senior developer Advocate the Posh programmer Lauren McManaman how are you today Lauren you know what I'm doing fantastic unfortunately my little dog not so much uh he's chilling on my lap at the moment because of a renegade fire alarm so I apologize in the advance if we have any surprise guest noises in the back or barking it wouldn't be a podcast without some background noise right true well we also as I mentioned have a special guest with us today we have the principal product manager for workflow automation Miss jingfen how are you today I'm good hello my name is Jing Fay I'm the product manager for flow designer hi yay one of our favorite products well before we begin can we get to know a little bit about you tell us a little bit about about yourself yeah so um before I joined service now I was actually a customer I work for TD Bank as a service now developer um about five six seven years ago um and then I became a service not architect and then yeah I make the move to to join the team and uh really want to make the product really speaking to the customer so yes um I'm really passionate about the tool of the product have you always been on the flow designer team uh after joining service now yeah yeah flow designer is my favorite Builder yes this is your home yes another fun little question that we like to ask our guests too is describe a time in your career cuz everyone has so many cool awesome career highes we all like to talk about embarrassing career little oopsies so did you ever have a moment in a job that you thought like oh my gosh this is the end this is what I'm going to get for for uh yeah yeah there's actually one time um it's nothing about the work I do but it's Joy a workplace so I was about to go to lunch and then I was heating up a a burger and then I didn't realize that the burger has aluminum foil uh wrapped within paper and so I saw flame in the microwave and I was like oh oh oh there shouldn't be flame and so I would just freeze there for second and my colleague quickly took the burger out and put in this thing so it wasn't the building wasn't down and by the way the my office was like a 50F floor tower building so oh my gosh that would be good that's great that's like the burnt popcorn in the microwave it'll just smell all afternoon yes yes yes so nothing happened look everyone I made plasma I don't know if you'd get fired for that one but certainly you you you'd get labeled for it I will get into trouble yes and then to kind of bring up the mood a little bit past burnt Burger when you're not on the job what do you enjoy doing uh I'm I'm a dancer myself so I I do a lot of different types of dances and I do I do jazz I do ballet I do Chinese dance you have you seen those dance with a lot of fan and long sleeve and then turning like a like a yes the Y billboard is like right outside my house that's so cool yeah I do those I do those how long have you danced for oh more longer history than service now I started dancing when I was three back in China oh my God yeah that's so cool way to keep at it like I love I love hearing people with hobbies that they've had like their whole life like that's so cool yeah yeah I I really like the hobby you keep me in shape so I can eat burgers we're going to just keep calling back to that burger the whole show I can see this you know our flow designer discussions going to revolve around burgers or something I I that's one of my favorite questions on this podcast because you discover something about people that you didn't know it's not all technology it's not all service now it there there's other things in life to discover and keep your occupied mm for sure all right into the main topic can you give us an overview of flow designer we we've had it for a while but uh there may be people that are brand new to this podcast yeah so if you don't know flow designer flow designer is a local NOCO alternative uh to the traditional code way of doing automation so uh let's say if you want to automate a business process today you might be using business rule client script uh script include all these tools that are available in the product but I would really encourage you to start exploring flow designer so flow designer is nothing more than just a trigger plus bunch of components so it can be trigger plus an action or trigger plus a flow logic and then also a subflow so you can control when the automation you want to run and what do you want the automation to achieve so it's very friendly to both developers as well as citizen developer people with with with or without technical knowledge absolutely it just had it its sixth birthday which is really cool so it's bit like Chuck said it's been out for a qu considerable amount of time but I'm always amazed that it's still like producing such different changes with every single release like there's always new features to look forward to I know you already showcase these in a Creator toolbox last or this week guess it was this week so be sure to check out our YouTube channel to see these features but as far as Washington goes can you give us a rundown of some of the new things that have just come out for flow designer yeah yeah sure so yeah you're right we invest invest heavily into flow designer every single release and more so in Washington so Washington I would say I would bucket all the uh new features in into four categories there is the uh workflow Studio that's one place one single place you ever need to go for everything workflow wise if you want to automate something that's a place to go so a homepage a brand new way to for a for you to find and then um quickly access which flow and which automation you want to you want to open up so that's one big theme um another one is ai ai generative AI they shouldn't be there just going to be AI in every single topic um so we are investing very heavily in generative AI with flow designer so we're releasing a feature called flow generation that basically turns plain English description into a uh flow so you can just describe in English what you want to achieve and that will turn and build a flow for you so it's very magical um the third thing I want to bring up is uh the parity around flow diagramming so we started the journey on Flow diagramming a few releases back but really in Washington we're finishing the journey we want to finish off of what we started before so making sure everything is supported diagramming all the flow Logics all the triggers all the tools and all the functionality that's that's our main focus one of the main focus in Washington and finally um a crowd favorite is safer editing so this includes undo redo autosave protected editing some subtle warning just usability and enhancement to make flow designer more user friendly I covered a lot I know we can go into detail for all of these oh yeah well that's a great segue you talked a little bit about workflow studio and how it's the central place for all of these flows subflows decision tables process automation uh why did we make this change because we just came out with a beautiful new homepage in Vancouver yeah so in Vancouver the new homage revamp was a step towards workflow studio and so the the gist is I don't want my customer to keep remembering oh this is the flow that is the process the decision you need to go to somewhere else I didn't want you guys to remember different places and different terms I want you to just know this one place and that's the only place you need to go so that's why we consolidate all the different Builders around automation into one place so you don't you no longer need to hunt around and and bounce back and forth between different Builders this is the only place to go um with that being said we're not taking the access away uh if you if you still type uh flow designer in the navigation bar you're still going to be landing the F in the same place in workflow studio so it's not like you know we're changing your habit uh you can still you can adopt to this new terminology but either way you're going to be using it that's good because I still type flow designer in the navigation and you can see it it brings up the URL and then does a redirect like oh good so even your favorites if you have favorites in your in in your favorites menu it says flow designer it will work by there because it's it's just going to do a redirect you don't have to like undo the old one and redo the new one so thank you for keeping that simple yeah just gonna take some change the muscle memory a little bit not for us oldtimers good luck with that that's a really insightful thing that you said though about like we don't want the burden of responsibility of remembering all of the locations and various names of of this product as it has grown and changed right like we want them to remember one thing and make it easy and even if they remember the old thing it still takes them all to the same place so I really really like that one thing that we do want to make sure that users know are just like standard operating procedures I I always find it funny because like I said flow designer has been out for a while but there's still like some consistent frequently asked questions that we get about this product so as one of the like leaders of flow designer do you have kind of some standard questions and the answers to those yeah questions it's like why do I need to use flow designer I can achieve the same thing using a business R why do I need to care I would say if you want to make your instance high maintainable and highly upgradeable you want to use flow designer so you just need to really go back to your job of automate things think about the business process you want to automate really think about the business problem you're trying to solve the efficiency you're about to bring and don't worry about you know upgrade compatibility all these issues that you're going to face because we take care of that as soon as the automation is on the flow we take care of the rest so for that we also invest a lot into revamping the flow engine that's the that's the thing that powers all the flow behind the scene so we put in so much work to make it scalable to make it accessible to make it really really maintainable so all this effort That You Don't See is because we invest we investig we invest so much into into the tool so um that's one of the big benefit for using flow designer and you also said like the the flow designer itself too is designed to be consumed by a multitude of roles right it's not just the pro coder that's writing actions it's the citizen developer that are creating the process it's process automation designer business owners that can arrange and kind of scaffold things out and it's even like Business Leaders because it writes everything out in a natural language so you're not having to interpret know pages of code you can just look at a flow diagram that's already created anyway yeah yeah exactly so we we're trying to enable more people in creating automation not just people who knows how to code so do you know do you need to know how to cat in order to use flow designer absolutely not um with the tools it's it's the way I describe to people is nothing more than a if this and that so if something happen describe what you want to do simple as that it can be complex but it can be very simple so uh with the generative AI we're trying to enable more people so you might be let's say creating a flow by describing it after you describe it you you turn the diagramming view on here is the diagram of what you just described and you put that to your management be like it this what you want me to automate so we're trying to really make the process end to end very smooth for you now I hate to also bring this up because it's kind of like my personal Boogeyman right but there was a predecessor for flow designer there was something so for the newer developers out there flow designer had a preceding product called the workflow editor and so one consistent question we got was with the onset of workflow studio is that also going to include anything for the Legacy workflow editor no Legacy workflow editor is not going to be in scope for workflow Studio Legacy workflow editor we actually have not invested into the tool for uh four or five years it just in maintain Moon um there was issues with Legacy workflow editor so that's why the the company decide not to invest in in the tool um we currently don't have a sunset plan uh announced but it's definitely in our mind to to to to roll out a procedure or a strategy around that so I would encourage everybody to if you want to create net new automation please please start using flow designer you hear that everybody it's time it's time to close the shop doors on workflow editor it's like I said it's been my personal Boogyman for years and I'm like come on it's FL float is designer is so much farther ahead of where workflow editor ever was there's no excuses anymore let's go well Jing Fay we love asking our product managers to give us a hint of what's coming up so what's on the road map for flow designer and workflow Studio etc etc Safe Harbor Safe Harbor yeah yeah quite quite a lot of different things so um first of all ai ai we continuously to put more effort more work into AI right now uh what we release in Washington is taking a plain English paragraph and generate the outline and so just the the structure the skeleton of the flow but we want to actually make sure that paragraph turn into a full flow ideally a functioning testable flow for you and so that's what we're working on um to quickly or to continuously enhance the AI capability also another thing that we're working on is something called trigger Builder so I have seen a lot of you creating flow that does nothing else but calling a subf flow guilty I've done that I have done that too same well it's nice because by by starting with a subflow you're Gathering all your logic into one place and you can with the flow API call it from say UI action so I want to trigger that set of nicely easily build maintainable stuff from a button click on a form or uh or from a trigger and it may be the same logic over and over so hence the need for subflows and why you know why duplicate the whole thing yeah and and I don't need to trigger it with a record update or a schedule time I need to trigger it manually with an event like a button click yes yes understood very understandable and and I feel guilty about that too I have done it too and there sometimes I would even recommend this to as a best practice to customers and so uh we are working on a new feature called trigger Builder so that that's essentially decoupling trigger from regular flow so you can reuse trigger you can configure trigger and then you can uh combine a few triggers together and then you can reuse the same trigger in multiple different flows so yeah so we're trying to formalize the way that you guys already use trigger versus flow um and make make that as a separate item for you yeah I'm curious to see the use cases on that because when I think of reusing the same trigger it's like why wouldn't if I said run this flow when an incident is updated and it's a priority one for example if I use that multiple times wouldn't I be triggering like four Flows at the same time yeah four Flows at the same time however different flows could have different prorities of running so you could have something on high priority you might want to take that into one flow and don't combine it into you know a giant flow right or sometimes you could be um it could be like the the flow has already configured and then you just need to know okay when incident is I don't know updated with short description of such what should be running or what is currently running you can qu all the flow on the same trigger and then find what's already there so that you don't need to create you know duplicate work I'm looking forward to seeing that that's that's coming up right yes coming up okay yes yes yes we want it now we always want everything now we want yesterday is a thankless job being on these podcasts because you just put out an entire lease and we're like but yeah but we want the new stuff too and most of our listeners haven't even touched the new stuff yeah we're the worst kids on it yeah give me more resources I'll get it done um the final thing I want to also uh bring up is performance performance performance performance we we heard you we heard things are slow saving flow is slow popul flow is slow we have heard this feedback from many many customers and we heard you so every single release up to Washington we have been putting effort onto streaming streamlining performance or like reducing technical debt behind the scene for the past few release but we're we're not stopping here we're we're continue with uh doing more work to make sure the tool can support the scale the scalability and the the volume the customer is looking for so one thing we're trying to uh Implement is called Json save it's like a different way behind the scene that's that a flow is saved so I won't go to too much detail because my engineering manager described it to me in a way that I was like I think I get it yeah it's like currently blows are saved into multiple different uh relational database objects but we want to bring that just as one Json object to save so that your saving is is faster it's a smaller set of things to save so you should see no transparent change no no UI change on your side but it just faster yes interesting it used to be multiple records in multiple tables I mean when we first came out with flow designer your update set was littered you all I did is made a trigger and made it do a log statement and you've got you know many many entries in your update set you got a lot of things in the up this set yeah yeah and then then we collapsed that so I like okay it's just one update uh so this this is interesting that is that part of the the new engine the version two engine that's enabling the the faster saves no engine is uh engine is engine revamp that's the different work for performance Autos saave it's also we put in some performance Improvement uh together into Autos save as well and this Json save is another effort so yeah so we we just we just keep improving on performance and we just talked to the SDK guys on the last episode is flow designer going to be tying in with the SDK at all uh I think that is on the road map but it's not in zanadu release just curious that's some cool stuff making records and modifying stuff right in an IDE yeah yeah so so the idea for anyone who doesn't know is to to come up with a uh markup language so that Pro coders without going to the UI can just code a flow in their IDE and then integrate into their service now instance and then boom it turn into a flow which should be antithetical to what flow designer's principle is like it's a low code tool I'm gonna make you do it all in code we're enabling everybody here okay everybody because you have those gray-haired old guys like me that are going I love [Laughter] code speaking of enablement another good seg way one thing that we always like to talk about on this podcast too is give people some actionable advice so if there have been people are sitting here and being man know I want to make the jump flow designer or I'm a new developer and I haven't really dabbled in automation especially in flow designer yet do you have any recommendations or advice for those types of yeah um I would so first of all a advice for people who are thinking switching from Legacy workflow Editor to flow designer um it's not a Ono one translation so I wouldn't say say one activity in workflow editor equals one action in flow designer you probably want to do it as the opportunity to ramline your process so go back to the drawing board go back to your business process and see where where are the points that you want to automate and just take the single item you want to automate and then put that into a flow designer you don't need to automate the entire process at once you can start small start from from a chunk start from a thing that's you know that's bugging you the most I would recommend each flow that should contain no more than 10 uh action or flow logic because if it's more than 10 I would recommend you to break it down into subflows break it down into processes and so that it's easily um just so in the future if you ever need to troubleshoot it will be easier for you great advice and I I've been preaching that for a long time so hopefully we said the same thing that's great yeah thank you for joining us today Jing Fe it has been wonderful to talk to you but before we let you go can you let the listener know because I'm sure they have ideas and suggestions and would love to get in touch with you how can they get in touch with you yeah so one way and this is my off the official way is to uh suggest your ideas on idea portal or if you see an idea you really like you can upload that and we do take idea portal really seriously so the highly voted ideas hey that there's no no stronger evidence for me to prioritize that in my in my road map you know so it's very very effective if you do that um personally I'm also open on LinkedIn so if you just need to talk to me directly and if you want to know more insight about flow designer or if you want to know road map update or anything I can help you with just reach out on LinkedIn I'm really open to that I'll put a link to your profile in the show notes yes please will you be making it to knowledge this year I will be yes okay so look for her there you might even get some FaceTime too yes please come come well thank you Jing feay and thank you wonderful listener for joining us today please remember there are other service now podcasts out there 14 15 of them I forgot I lost count you can find them all at servicenow.com Community under the events menu or wherever you find popular podcasts you found breakpoint didn't you try that subscribe to this and all the other service now podcasts for absolutely free to get them automatically delivered to you breakpoint is brought to you by service now executive producers would be me and Lauren McManaman and to find out more about the service now developer program we invite you to head over to developer. servicenow.com thank you very much Jing Fay thank you thank you for having me please let us know what you you think about this podcast you can leave feedback or ask questions in the service now Community for more great information on service now development check out the service now developer portal at developer. servicenow.com thanks for listening I'm in pain but I'm going to keep smiling I don't know but someone's fire alarm was chirping what should I do we'll get through it we'll get through it am I too loud what question you want to hit next I was like it's your question you're you're good at that one I can do that I can do that that'll get them amped up the last 10 minutes were Agony and with that we are done