A Plea for Flow Designer

[Rob Greeley]

As a ServiceNow Platform Owner and Master Architect, I want to offer a respectful but heartfelt plea to the expert developer community: please embrace Flow Designer.

I understand why many developers prefer scripting. You’re skilled coders — experts who can solve problems quickly with scripts, script includes, and business rules. Flow Designer, by comparison, can feel restrictive. The interface is limited and can be quirky. Building something simple might even seem slower than just writing a quick script.

But here’s the reality from where I sit: once you move on from the project (and you will), it's the platform owner and future teams who inherit what you’ve built. Automations crafted in Flow Designer — using flows, subflows, actions, and decision tables — are infinitely easier to understand, maintain, troubleshoot, and build upon than a scattered network of scripts.

As soon as your code is released into production, however, scripts become technical debt. Scripts can be complex and lack documentation. Architectural diagrams that show how the scripts function together rarely exist. When something breaks, or needs to be enhanced, we’re left to piece together the logic manually, often under tight timelines and heavy pressure. Flow Designer, in contrast, provides transparency. It creates visible, structured processes that can be extended, reused, integrated, and debugged without needing to decode layers of custom code.

Using Flow Designer isn’t about being "less technical" — it's about being strategic. It’s about building for the platform’s future, not just for today’s deadlines.

We need your expertise — and we also need your foresight. Please help us ensure that what you build becomes a foundation for others to build on, not a barrier.