Introducing step descriptions: Easily collaborate, document, and understand every step of every workflow on the Tray Platform

Greetings Citizen Automators! Today, we are adding another consumer experience to the Tray Platform: step descriptions. Step descriptions makes it easy to collaborate with your team members, document every step of every workflow, and quickly uplevel your team's ability to build workflows confidently.

Step descriptions solves two challenges many of our builders face when they see a workflow for the first time. First, if a workflow automates a complex process like lead routing or marketing personalization, it can be challenging to understand the logic behind each step of that workflow. Second, without understanding how a workflow works, how can new builders confidently make updates to it? 

We built step descriptions because our product and engineering teams anticipated that we needed a more natural way to describe workflows at each step. As we started to work with larger enterprise customers, we realized this challenge would only get more substantial, particularly as users create increasingly complex workflows.

Google Docs’ ability to easily comment and collaborate within a team inspired our product team, and so they went to work to bring this same experience to the Tray Platform. Step descriptions provides users a very similar capability to describe each step within a workflow so that anyone with access to a workflow can quickly understand the logic behind every workflow. When new members can fully grasp the logic of a workflow, it makes it easy for them to add to, maintain, or edit workflows confidently. With step descriptions, team members can spend much less time trying to interpret a workflow, since the answer is clear to them at each step!

Example: Using step descriptions to explain the functionality of a Slack step.

To use the feature, simply click into a specific workflow, and hover your cursor over any step in your workflow. A pop-up will then appear, prompting you to describe this step. Click into the pop-up, type out your description, and click save. Try hovering over the step again to see your newly-added description! If you need to edit, click into that step again, make your updates, and save your work.

In the future, we are also planning to add the ability to "@mention" other members of your team (again, very similar to Google Docs). The "@mention" feature will let you ask for help or show your team a fresh new way to build workflows on the Tray Platform.

Throughout the first half of the year, the Tray Platform has rapidly added powerful new functionality. In addition to step descriptions, we have also launched error handling, which provides users the ability to manage any error that could occur at every step of their workflows, and rollback history, which makes it easy to "rollback" to any prior version of a workflow. We also added a new product to the Tray Platform: Tray Embedded, which helps product teams rapidly scale their customer integrations and grow their business.

Have questions? Check out our documentation platform. Do you want to see the Tray Platform in action? Register for one of our weekly group demos.