Flow Designer Best Practices – What Helped Me in a Personal Project

[srikanthmadabhu]

Hi Community,

While working on a personal ServiceNow project in my Personal Developer Instance, I relied heavily on Flow Designer and learned a few practical best practices that made a big difference.

Sharing these in case they help others:

• Keep flows small and focused — avoid doing everything in one flow
• Use clear naming for actions and subflows to improve readability
• Prefer subflows for reusable logic
• Add decision points carefully to avoid complex branching
• Test flows incrementally to simplify troubleshooting

This was a self-initiated learning project (not production work), but following these practices made the solution easier to maintain, explain, and refine.

Question to the community:

What Flow Designer practice has helped you the most in real implementations?

Looking forward to learning from your experiences.

[Aditya_hublikar · Accepted solution]

Hello @srikanthmadabhu ,

It really nice that you share flow designer practice , as per my understanding i mentioned some practice that i followed.

Use trigger conditions properly so the flow doesn’t run on every update unnecessarily.It improve system performance.

Avoid excessive Look Up Record steps, as multiple database calls can slow down execution.

Use Subflows for reusable processes like notifications, task creation, or approvals to maintain consistency.

Implement error handling to manage failures gracefully instead of letting flows silently fail.

Use custom action only when you need to implement complex logic .

[1mukulKumawat · Accepted solution]

Hi ,
We can also consider following points:-
1. Minimize scripting in action and use script include inted 
2. Use subflow for repetitive processes

[SohamTipnis · Accepted solution]

Hi @srikanthmadabhu,

I like this; you kept it simple and understandable, and thank you for not using GPT in this. You used your own words and knowledge as per your understanding. Keep it up!👍

Suggestions I would lime to give you is

1. Use triggering conditions neatly.

2. Make sure you practice on decision-making and flow scripts.

3. Do explore more on flow design, as it holds a very strong post in ServiceNow, and once you master this, your process understanding of a problem will be minimized.

4. Also, complete a micro-certification of Flow Designer from ServiceNow University.

If you find my answer useful, please mark it as Helpful and Correct ‌😊

Regards,
Soham Tipnis
ServiceNow Developer ||  Technical Consultant
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/sohamtipnis10

[Aditya_hublikar · Accepted solution]

Hello @srikanthmadabhu ,

It really nice that you share flow designer practice , as per my understanding i mentioned some practice that i followed.

Use trigger conditions properly so the flow doesn’t run on every update unnecessarily.It improve system performance.

Avoid excessive Look Up Record steps, as multiple database calls can slow down execution.

Use Subflows for reusable processes like notifications, task creation, or approvals to maintain consistency.

Implement error handling to manage failures gracefully instead of letting flows silently fail.

Use custom action only when you need to implement complex logic .

[1mukulKumawat · Accepted solution]

Hi ,
We can also consider following points:-
1. Minimize scripting in action and use script include inted 
2. Use subflow for repetitive processes

[SohamTipnis · Accepted solution]

Hi @srikanthmadabhu,

I like this; you kept it simple and understandable, and thank you for not using GPT in this. You used your own words and knowledge as per your understanding. Keep it up!👍

Suggestions I would lime to give you is

1. Use triggering conditions neatly.

2. Make sure you practice on decision-making and flow scripts.

3. Do explore more on flow design, as it holds a very strong post in ServiceNow, and once you master this, your process understanding of a problem will be minimized.

4. Also, complete a micro-certification of Flow Designer from ServiceNow University.

If you find my answer useful, please mark it as Helpful and Correct ‌😊

Regards,
Soham Tipnis
ServiceNow Developer ||  Technical Consultant
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/sohamtipnis10

[Dr Atul G- LNG · Accepted solution]

Hi @srikanthmadabhu 

Worth reading

https://www.servicenow.com/community/workflow-automation-articles/flow-designer-best-practices-overv...

cc: @Lisa Holenstein