Why Create Custom Playbook Activities in Creator Studio?

[KiernanM]

Why Create Custom Playbook Activities in Creator Studio?

When you’re building in Creator Studio, the out-of-the-box playbook activities cover a lot of ground. You’ve got approvals, notifications, assignments — the basics are there. But we know real-world processes rarely fit neatly into the box. That’s where custom playbook activities come in.

A custom activity lets you bring your company’s unique workflows into Creator Studio so that anyone building an app can drop them into a playbook without reinventing the wheel. Think of it as codifying the “special sauce” of your business into reusable building blocks.

Why you might want a custom activity

Here are a few common reasons customers decide to go down this path:

• Tailored approvals. The standard approval activity assumes a requester’s manager — but what if your process routes through a department head, a regional lead, or even a cross-functional committee? A custom activity lets you build that logic once and make it available to everyone.

• Complex flows. Sometimes decision logic is too advanced to build with simple playbook automations. Maybe you need multiple conditions, escalations, or exception handling. In that case, you can design the flow in Workflow Studio, then expose it back to Creator Studio as a clean, reusable activity.

• Beyond email. The standard notification activity sends emails — which is fine until you want a Teams message, a Slack ping, or some other integration. By wrapping those flows as a custom activity, you make it easy for citizen developers to bring richer communication channels into their apps.

How it works under the hood

Here’s the gist:

• An admin (or someone with the right roles) creates the underlying flow, subflow, or action in Workflow Studio.

• That flow gets defined as an activity and added to the Creator Studio Activities table.

• From there, the activity shows up in the playbook picker, just like the out-of-the-box ones. Builders see it, drag it in, and configure it with the fields you’ve chosen to expose.

Why it matters

The value here isn’t just about technical flexibility — it’s about governance and scale. With custom activities, you:

• Reduce duplication. Build once, reuse everywhere.

• Empower more builders. Non-technical users don’t need to know Workflow Studio to leverage advanced workflows.

• Stay consistent. Critical business processes get standardized across apps, rather than reinvented in every new playbook.

For many of our customers, custom playbook activities are the bridge between structured enterprise processes and business-led app creation. They allow you to capture organizational knowledge, package it neatly, and make it available at scale.

If you want the full step-by-step guide on how to create and publish these activities, check out our documentation here.