Behind the scenes: Bringing the Yokohama release to life

The ServiceNow Platform Yokohama release features enhanced automation, stronger governance, and more seamless workflow intelligence.

Globally, ServiceNow engineering teams worked together to bring the Yokohama release to life. Here’s a behind-the-scenes look from employees in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) who helped build it.

Elevating workflows and change management

As part of any ServiceNow Platform release cycle, we gather feedback from thousands of customers. “We are a customer-first company,” explains Arya H., software engineering manager at ServiceNow.

That customer feedback led to improvements in workflow automation. The Yokohama release migrates all users from the Workflow process automation interface to Flow Designer. This provides a more unified, no-code experience to create end-to-end digital workflows.

“The key to this delivery was ensuring the new technology could account for all the functionality previously provided by Workflow, to avoid customer frustration with the move,” Arya says. “Flow Designer gives you a beautiful interface to understand and digest what an end-to-end process might involve.”

Similarly, the Yokohama release includes a refreshed interface in Service Operations Workspace and gives greater visibility into change management processes.

“For the first time, we're saying to customers: ‘We can give you this cool experience for change management and better tie things together for you,’” Arya says. “We’re showing how you can process conflicts better for your change record, and how you can view them in a cleaner way, for example.”

Creating stronger, more intuitive data analytics

Customers also wanted more robust reporting capabilities. The Yokohama release offers next-generation analytics, richer reporting, and improved data source integrations.

“This release introduces a more intuitive dashboard experience, a data-agnostic reporting solution, and improved performance—making it easier than ever to gain insights,” says Oriol A., a principal software engineer.

“Dashboards now load faster and support a broader range of data sources. This new experience is more powerful, scalable, and user-friendly, making analytics more accessible and efficient," he adds.

Oriol is proud of the analytics advancements he and his team delivered. “I also love the cross-team collaboration we’ve built across multiple locations,” he continues. “It’s been a great experience working with so many talented colleagues.”

Supporting a smooth release

It’s imperative with every ServiceNow Platform release cycle that we ensure updates and new features are ready for customers to use. Post-release, Nisma M., senior staff technical program manager, and her supportability and release readiness team analyse customer data to drive further improvements to the customer support experience.

The team acts as an important touchpoint between developers, quality engineers, and documentation teams, as well as sales and marketing.

For the Yokohama release, Nisma’s team reviewed more than 1,600 features and looked at over 520 transfer of information (TOI) records to support new functionality. TOIs from developers help users understand new features while signposting ways to troubleshoot issues.

“Flexibility is the number one skill needed in my job,” Nisma explains. “We're all focusing on the end goal and not on which team is in charge of what. We’re all responsible for ensuring Yokohama, or whatever release we are in, is delivered successfully. Once you have that mindset, any challenges you face are reduced.”

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