At a minimum, it'd be great to be able to name each workflow step. That way, anybody can follow the flow of what a workflow is doing. This would also make it way easier when testing a workflow to make sure the branch that "tested positive" was the right one. Currently you have no way of knowing what step the test is talking about.
Agree - if you can add ann explanation - or replace the current 'fucntional' title with something meaningful, it would help others understand the workflow.
@MFrankJohnson You have one of your wishes: Workflows have folders now!
Agreed, or even more simply a "Description" field for each workflow and workflow folder. Today we have descriptions for properties, but workflows are much more complex.
@simonh321 thanks for the tip! Unfortunately I have been mostly working with deal workflows and there is no description field for these. It seems contact workflows are the only type with a description field.
I fully agree that we need some sort of notes for the different steps in a workflow. With the possibility of growing more and more complex workflows it is crucial to be able to provide some insights to the workflow.
Today I am using a 3rd party program to draw and explain the workflows separately, which is completely waste of time (and money).
Just having the option of having a small "call-out" like in Excel.
Yes, it would be awesome to be able to do this just like ActiveCampaign. Right now, I record videos of myself explaining the workflow step-by-step. But ultimately, we all need to make sure we can cover our bases and keep others notified about workflow setups.
In our organization, there is a lot of collaboration and review of some rather complex workflows. I often have 3 or 4 open and on the go at any given time and I can't always remember which step or path needed review or input.
Being able to put Post-It notes (or some other type of notation format) around the workflow with questions or to be able to highlight a change or make a suggestion would save a lot of time. Sometimes, it can be days before the team has had a chance to review a workflow and we'll forget which step needs to reviewed.
It could be something similar to Track Changes or co-editing in Microsoft Word docs.
I'm Jesse Tremblay, Product Manager for our Automation products here at HubSpot. Thanks for all the feedback and ideas in this thread. It's really helpful for us to understand some critical gaps.
We definitely appreciate how complex workflows can become, especially with all the added functionality & use-cases, as well as when collaborating with others. While we don't have a specific solution planned for this now, we are going to review this and figure out where it fits in priority. We will update this thread as we figure things out.
@MeganLegge@jtremblay The titles for IF statements was been a great step forward to help explain the logic in 'marketing english'. Anything else to help with self-documentation would be appreciated.
I'm Megan, another product manager for the workflows tool. In follow up to Jesse's update above, we've put this feature on our roadmap and are actively making plans for introducing this. If anyone here would be open to answering some follow up questions about their thoughts and ideas for this feature, please send me a direct message
Anyone else interested in providing feedback on our team's plan for the above, proposed feature of adding notes to workflow actions, I invite you to check out some designs & fill out this 3 question survey (it will take only a few minutes of your time):
Great idea! Sometimes I can't even follow my working for some of the more complicated workflows, let alone the poor soul who tries to work it out after me. This would be an amazing feature to signpost branches, what will happen, why its happening, or even give some info about a collection of actions (in the workflow) that coordinate to generate one "action" as defined by our usual process lexicon.
Workflow action Comments are now live to all customers 🎉
We're actively working on adding @ mentioning capabilities to this feature, so keep an eye out for that coming soon.
We're also working with other teams as HubSpot to enable a workflow-level commenting system, that's not tied to any specific action, but rather references the workflow itself as a whole.
Follow up question for feedback: Currently, workflow action level comments will not carry over if a workflow is cloned. If anyone has thoughts about this (is that good? bad? why?) I'd love to hear more from you, please comment or send me a direct message.
