Creator Toolbox: Zurich Flow Designer Enhancements to Stages and Variables

[Allen Andreas]

Creator Toolbox: Zurich Flow Designer Enhancements to Stages and Variables

In this episode of Creator Toolbox, Senior Developer Advocates @Allen Andreas and @Laszlo Balla are joined by Vanessa Wang, Inbound Product Manager on the Workflow Automation Team, to take a deeper look at some of the Zurich enhancements to Flow Designer stages and variables!

Vanessa provides live demos of both features, shows how they solve real-world challenges, and discusses best practices for applying them to everyday automation. The conversation also touches on customer feedback, use cases from the ServiceNow community, and where to share your own ideas for future improvements.

Aggregate Subflow Stages

Until Zurich, parent flows couldn’t display the stages of nested subflows. This often forced developers to create clunky workarounds or maintain oversized “monster flows.” Zurich solves this with a simple “Show Subflow Stages” option, which rolls up subflow progress directly into the parent timeline. The result: better visibility, easier troubleshooting, and alignment with ServiceNow’s best practice of reusing modular subflows instead of bloated one-offs.

Complex Objects & Append Logic

Developers can now define complex object variables in Flow Designer, including arrays of objects. Combined with the new append to flow variable logic, this enables powerful use cases such as dynamically building lists, capturing user inputs, and iterating through records without scripting. What once required custom actions or Glide scripting can now be done entirely in Flow Designer.

Why It Matters

These enhancements empower admins and developers to:

• Reduce technical debt by embracing modular flows.
• Gain transparency into process execution for faster debugging.
• Handle structured data in no-code flows, expanding use cases for Flow Designer.

As Vanessa highlights, these improvements are grounded in real customer feedback and unlock cleaner, more maintainable automation. Whether you’re an experienced architect or new to Flow Designer, Zurich makes it easier to do things the right way.

Be sure to check out the full episode for live demos and tips, and don’t forget to share your own feedback in the comments section below or the ServiceNow Idea Portal.