Not every change deserves an immediate email. We designed three notification frequencies - Electric, Mindful, and Chilled - to give watchers control over their own inbox load. The tension between real-time updates and respectful batching shaped everything about how we aggregate and deliver watching notifications.
Why we designed workflow assignment around groups instead of individuals. The counterintuitive decision to make all users belong to all groups by default, and how this shapes better process thinking.
When building workflow software, the distinction between process-level managers and step-level owners creates fundamental design tensions that shape how work actually gets done.
The moment an anonymous visitor becomes a tracked participant. How we designed public forms that let anyone launch a workflow, and why email validation transforms random submissions into real process runs.
The seven-year journey from customer request to elegant two-rule solution. Why checkboxes beat flowcharts for handling complex approval rejections and re-work scenarios in workflow automation.
Nobody reads their 47th task reminder. We learned this the hard way building 77 email templates across 6 locales. The daily digest became our answer - an activity-stream approach that pulls people in instead of pushing them away. Here is the engineering story behind reminder emails that actually get opened.
Building an if-this-then-that framework for workflow automation. The internal debates, the disagreements on scope, and why testing rules before deployment became the defining feature.
Most companies already have SOPs in Word or PDF. The challenge was converting those static documents into executable workflows without making users re-type everything.
Why we built custom SAML authentication instead of paying enterprise auth vendors. The real cost of SSO, handling certificates, SCIM provisioning, and a security vulnerability that taught us about private key exposure.
How we solved the gap between process flowcharts and workflow software - why swimlanes show who does what, but traditional tools only capture the what.
The biggest problem in workflow software was never technical. It was getting team agreement on who does what. How this insight shaped everything we built at Tallyfy.
The separation between blueprints and running instances is not obvious to users. Here is the mental model debate that shaped how we organize work in Tallyfy.
When your shipping process differs slightly by country, most teams clone their template fifteen times. This creates a maintenance nightmare. We designed a better approach: define variations from Standard and visualize the difference between one variation and another.
The permission matrix for watchers turned out simpler than expected. If you can edit an object, you can edit its watchers. That one sentence drove most of the design decisions.
Favorites in a business context does not really mean anything. You favorite something because you care about it - you want quick access and updates when things change. We redesigned the entire notification system around this insight, keeping the familiar star icon but completely rethinking what happens underneath.
We started building a separate EPIC for webhook subscriptions - letting users subscribe to specific events via API endpoints. Then we realized it overlapped with watching. The notification target became just another channel: email, webhook, or chat.
How we engineered deadline calculations that respect business hours, weekends, and timezones. The 2-hour default disaster, the Friday 4:30pm problem, and why user-level working hours had to wait.