2025 · B2B SaaS · Enterprise
Turning rigid approvals into a flexible visual workflow builder
Sastrify helps companies control their software spending. Every time someone wants to buy, renew, or cancel a SaaS tool, it runs through an approval workflow: who signs off, in what order, under what conditions.
The builder that created those workflows only handled simple, linear approvals. So enterprise clients with real procurement complexity, conditional rules, parallel sign-offs, department logic, couldn’t model how they actually work. Some of them left for competitors that could.
My role
Led the end-to-end redesign of Workflow Setup, collaborating with PMs, engineers, CSMs, procurement, and leadership. Also expanded the Design System and connected Initiatives to the workflow experience.
- Product design
- User research
- Systems thinking
- Design system
- Enterprise UX
- Visual design
Affinity map from 10+ stakeholder interviews
The insight
The brief was to redesign Workflow Setup. Talking to our procurement team, I realised that was only half of it.
The whole flow was confusing, from creating a workflow through to Initiatives, the feature where those workflows live and get triggered. No one in the company could hold all the possible paths and interactions in their head. Not even the procurement team, who were in it almost every day. And the Workflows themselves were too rigid to model real approvals. Neither piece worked on its own, so I flagged it and pushed to put both in scope.
Before: a linear form
Every approval was one step stacked on the next in a flat form. No branches, no conditions, no way to say “if it’s over 10k, add finance.” Each step took exactly one assignee, and nothing could run in parallel. So one person going on holiday would block their own step and stall every approval queued behind it, freezing the whole flow. Teams that needed anything more rebuilt the same workflow by hand every quarter.
After: a node-based builder
A workflow is now a canvas. You drop in steps, branch them, set conditions, and see the whole path at once. Several departments can handle their approval or task at the same time, so one person being out no longer stalls everyone behind them and the whole flow moves faster. The flat list became something you can actually follow.
Visual logic builder
10 incremental releases
I didn’t ship this in one drop. It went out in 10 releases, each one small enough to put in front of real customers before I built the next.
50+ enterprise customers adopted, +60% workflows built by IT personas, repeat use among first-wave customers. The same teams that used to rebuild workflows by hand every quarter were now spinning them up in minutes.
From a blank page to a working workflow in under two minutes.
Reflection
As designers we can spend weeks polishing the wrong thing. The brief points one way, and the real problem is often off to the side. So whenever I start something new, I step back and look at the bigger picture before I commit to a direction.
On Sastrify, that’s what caught it. I was handed one feature to fix. Stepping back showed me the whole flow was the problem, so I made the case to fix Initiatives and Workflow Setup together rather than the single screen in the brief.
Shipping in 10 small releases helped too. We delivered value to our customers from the first release and were able to test in between releases.
The fun part of this one was the scope fight. The brief was one feature, the real problem was two, and I had to make the case for that. If you work on enterprise tools where the hard part is the logic underneath, I’d love to talk.
natalia.wlwsk@gmail.com →