Today we’re very happy to launch the first major upgrade to Writeflow. We owe our first visionary customers a big debt of gratitude, you have helped us learn even more about how we can best help  leaders than we had hoped for, and we are proud of having put these learnings into product improvements at a rapid pace.

We have improved Writeflow across 4 areas:

• An improved flow designer with much better timeline control 

• Several enhancements to tasks

• Ability To cancel runs

• Google integration verified by Google

Below we will describe each in more detail

Improved Flow Designer

We quickly learned that while our first flow designer was able to handle the majority of the use cases we had in mind when founding Writeflow, there were a number of subtleties that left room for improvement. The new version is a ground up redesign, that has a much more intuitive timeline view:

The new version has a number of benefits:

• The explicit timeline, which includes the schedule settings, makes it much easier to keep a good understanding of what happens when in the flow, without switching views.

• The new sequence points (e.g. “Starts after 1 day”) ensures a flow will progress and finish in time, in the example above the agenda gets published even if some team members do not complete the task of providing agenda input.

• The sequence points also lets you control when a task starts (before it always started when its predecessor completed), so you can make sure you request action from your team members at an appropriate time.

• Steps are edited in-place (like above where the “Publish Final Agenda” task step is being edited) this makes it much quicker to make multiple step changes to get the overall flow just right.

Task Enhancements

Making sure things get done at the right time by the right people is at the heart of what we do at Writeflow, in that spirit we have provided our task system with a truckload of love:

• Multi-assignees So many task scenarios in management involve multiple team members doing similar things, for example: Meeting participants all contributing to an agenda, multiple people reviewing the same document, a management team all contributing to a presentation. Previously you had to manually create a step for each task assignee, and then separately create a wait step to ensure that everybody had completed their task before continuing. This is so much simpler now: Define a single task step, and add multiple assignees: Writeflow keeps track of the status for each assignee, and understands the overall task-step is only complete when everybody is done. The new sequence points (described in the previous section) makes the wait step unnecessary in most cases. So if you were collecting input from 6 team members before you needed a total of 7 steps (6 tasks and a wait), now you can do it all in a single step, 85% effort saved.

• Automatic Expiration Writeflow’s ability to continuously remind team members to get things done is a core part of our product, mimicking how we would handle overdue tasks in the analog world: Keep reminding the assignee until it gets done. However in the analog world we would also stop these reminders once the task was no longer relevant, even if it was not completed: A typical example is a task to provide input to a meeting, no need to keep it alive once the meeting is finished. In the new version of Writeflow, you provide an expiration for a task. When a task expires it gets canceled, and stops sending reminders.

• A better Tasks list Writeflow now gives you a more informative task list with more controls:

In addition to the task itself you can see which flow the task is from, due date information and easily cancel the task right from the list.

• Delegated Tasks list Writeflow makes it super easy to automatically assign tasks to your team members, now it’s equally simple to get an overview of their status: With the new Delegated Tasks view you can now easily get an overview of tasks assigned to others from your flows, including their status. You can also trigger some of the most common actions directly from the list: Cancel a task, or send a reminder to the assignee

• Manual Reminders As described above you can now send a manual reminder to your task assignees. Even though Writeflow includes a flexible reminder system, sometimes people just need that very special message 😉 to get the task over the finish line. In the new version you can send that with a button from the Delegated Tasks list.

An important new run control: Cancel

We love our runs! But, hey, sometimes it just wasn’t meant to be. We now have the ability cancel a run:

This action will intelligently cancel all tasks (and pending steps) associated with the run.

Google Integration Verified

Our Google Integration has now been through Google’s (very thorough!) review, and is officially approved. This means you will no longer see warnings about the integration being in development. If you’re wondering about why this is a big deal, just know that there are 800,000+ search results on Google for “Google Oauth Verification” 

That’s it! We can’t wait to learn how all these improvements help you lead your organization more effectively. We are committed to building the ultimate automation tool for leaders, that will allow you to put your management grunt work on autopilot and focus your precious time on your strategic leadership opportunities and challenges. We’re excited to keep learning and building.

If you’re not a customer yet but this post piqued your interest, please find a good time to chat here, and we will get you set up with our limited release.