Designing a Workflow
Last updated
Last updated
Use Wrangle web-based Workflow Designer to build your team's workflows and sync them to your Slack workspace. Watch this video to see the designer in action, or continue reading below to learn more about designing your workflow.
You can start designing a workflow from a number of places:
Wrangle App: In Slack, find Wrangle under the Apps heading in the left sidebar, or search Slack at the top for the Wrangle App. Once you're in the Wrangle App Home, you'll see a toggle in the top-right of the app that says either "My Approvals/Tasks" or "My Workflows." Make sure you've chosen "My Workflows" and you'll see a "⚡ Create Wrangle Workflow" button.
From starting a workflow: You can also get to the designer when starting a workflow. Search at the top of Slack for "Start a Workflow with Wrangle" and click the shortcut. From the "Start a Workflow" modal, select "Design a Workflow Instead."
No matter where you start from, you'll be directed to the Wrangle web app to launch the Workflow Designer. Sign in with your Slack credentials, and if you belong to more than one workspace, make sure to select the one with Wrangle installed.
When you open the Workflow Designer, we'll show you a gallery of templates you can start from, or you can start from scratch.
If you choose to start from a template, Wrangle will start you off with an intake form and workflow steps (approvals and task lists) that you can customize.
For the rest of this guide, we'll assume you're designing your own instead of starting from a template.
Your intake form captures all the context you need from your requesters.
For example, let's say you're doing a blog post publishing flow. Your intake form might have questions for the title of the blog post, a link to the draft post, and when you intend to publish. These fields provide vital context for people later in the flow like the manager that needs to approve the post.
Questions in your intake form have different types, depending on what kind of information you're trying to gather with the question:
Short Answer: for gathering short text, like the name of an employee to onboard
Long Answer: for gathering several sentences, like an explanation of what audience you're targeting with a blog post
Number Input: enforces that your users put in a valid number, like the percentage discount you want to offer a customer
Select a Date: lets users pick a date on the calendar, like when they want to publish a blog post if approved
Select a person: choose a single user that is active in your Slack workspace. Useful for identifying the manager of someone, or saying who is assigned to a customer.
Select multiple people: same as above, but you can pick more than one person
Select a channel: choose a Slack channel. This can be useful for identifying a specific team to route the request to.
Select from a list: create a custom drop-down of options. Useful for choosing a specific department in the company, or for picking which product a bug is affecting.
Upload files: lets users upload up to 10 files per question (must be less than 10MB per file). This is useful for things like expense reporting, bug reporting, or document reviews. Watch this video to learn more.
There is a 97-question limit per intake form. All question types in the intake form are also available for form steps, with the exception of "Upload files" questions.
In order to help you easily distinguish between instances of your workflow, Wrangle will append the response to one of your intake form questions to the workflow name every time a request is submitted.
By default, Wrangle will use the response to your first intake form question as part of your naming convention, but you can choose which question to use for naming in your Workflow Settings. If you edit your naming question after a workflow has been run, previous instances of your workflow will not be renamed.
For example, let's say we have a workflow for onboarding employees and we want to onboard Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe, both on the sales team. If our first question in the form asks what department they'll be in, this is how the workflow instances would be named by default:
"Employee Onboarding - HR Approval - Sales" created on Sept 8th
"Employee Onboarding - HR Approval - Sales" created on Sept 9th
But, as long as the first intake form question is "Employee Name" or you've chosen "Employee Name" as your naming question in your Workflow Settings, then Wrangle can give each instance a better name:
"Employee Onboarding - HR Approval - Sue Bird" created on Sept 8th
"Employee Onboarding - HR Approval - Megan Rapinoe" created on Sept 9th
After the intake form, a Wrangle workflow can have any number of approval, task list, and form steps (in any order).
For example, if we had a blog post publishing flow, our workflow might look like this:
Intake form - get details of the blog post draft
Approval step - have the marketing manager review and approve the post
Task list step - assign work to marketing employees to publish the post to the web and promote it on social media
Form step - have the marketing team make note of the blog tags they used and what the publish date was
Or, a sales quoting workflow might look like this:
Intake form - get details of what the client wants from the sales rep
Task list step - have the services team build a quote for how many hours would be required for the customer's use case
Approval step - get sign-off from the sales manager on the proposed quote
Form step - have the sales manager make note of any changes they made to the quote
Task list step - assign the sales rep to send the approved quote to the customer
When Wrangle is first installed in your workspace, we will do a one-time user sync to identify people in your Slack workspace who can be assigned to approval, task list, or form steps. The sync will not include invited users who have not yet joined your workspace, bots, or external users connected to your workspace via Slack Connect. For paying Wrangle customers, the user sync will run on a nightly basis.
Approval steps post an approval to a thread in a Slack channel, including the intake form answers for context. An approval gives reviewers buttons to Approve or Deny the request.
When designing your approval step, you can specify:
Which channel to post in
Who should be assigned to review
How many reviewers have to approve before the approval is considered done
Whether the approval has a due date
Whether the approval should be conditional
Learn more about how approvals work
Task list steps post a task list to a thread in a channel, including the intake form answers for context. A task list is a list of one or more tasks, each of which is assigned to people to complete.
When designing your task list step, you can specify:
Which channel to post in
The name of each task
Who to assign to each task
Whether each task has a due date
Whether the task list should be conditional
Task descriptions to help users complete their tasks - use Slack Markdown to include links and formatting
There is a limit of 20 tasks per task list step.
Learn more about how Task Lists work
Form steps post an additional form to a thread in a channel, including the intake form answers for context. Unlike the intake form, which can only be completed by the requester, form steps can be assigned to anyone in your workspace.
When designing your form step, you can specify:
The form's questions and corresponding question types
Which channel to post in
The name of the form
Who to assign to the form
Whether the form has a due date
Whether the form should be conditional
"Upload files" questions are only available for intake forms, not for form steps.
If you want Wrangle to post any step to a private channel in Slack, you'll have to invite Wrangle to that channel first. There are two ways to invite Wrangle to your channel. One way is to open the channel details in Slack, go to the "Integrations" tab, then click "Add an app" and select Wrangle.
Or you can @mention Wrangle in the channel, then click "Invite Them" in the followup message from Slackbot.
Workflows go in order through the steps. If the workflow looks like Intake form > Approval step > Task list step, then the approval does not start until the form is submitted. The final step, the task list, does not start until the approval step is approved.
Since reviewers in an approval step can deny the request, the workflow stops if there is a denial and does not advance to subsequent steps.
A task list step is considered complete when all of its tasks are marked as complete.
A form step is considered complete when the form has been filled out and submitted.
Once you're happy with your workflow's steps, you can save your workflow. This makes it available to anyone to kick off. It's a good idea to give your workflow a test by starting it and going through all of the steps, before you announce it to a wider audience to begin using it.
See "Using a Workflow" to learn how your newly-designed workflow works in Slack:
