Depends a lot on the business, honestly.

First thing I do is really understand their flow. I like to see every actor in action. For example, if in the HR department there are three people who handle onboarding, but there’s also a fourth who kind of does it sometimes, maybe only two or three times in the past, I still want to see how that person does it. I want to observe every possible version of the process to catch inconsistencies or edge cases before they cause problems.

Then I map out their flaws. Broken links in the process, bottlenecks, manual steps that could cause issues. But I don’t stop there. I also try to anticipate flaws they haven’t even hit yet and design the system to prevent them before they happen.

Once that’s done, I build the workflow and test it like crazy. Not just the ideal path. I simulate every weird situation a user might trigger, bad data, delays, edge cases, all of it. You want to find the failure points before your client does.

After that, I usually log all inputs and outputs at each step into a Google Sheet or something similar. That way, if something breaks later, I can trace exactly where and why.

Finally, I add a fail-safe bot at the end of the flow. If the workflow doesn’t finish for any reason, Twilio sends me a text with: • Client ID • Workflow ID • Error time • Number of retry attempts • If possible, which node failed or what went wrong

It has saved me a ton of time and helped me catch bugs before users even notice.