Creating Workflows

This guide walks you through creating a workflow from scratch. By the end, you will have a working multi-step process with assigned agents, gates, and a trigger that determines when the workflow runs.

Before you start

Make sure you have:

• At least one agent created in your workspace (workflows assign tasks to agents)
• Admin or Owner role in your organisation (Members cannot create workflows)

Create a new workflow

1. Navigate to the Workflows page

   Sign in to team.sprigr.com and click Workflows in the sidebar. This page lists all workflows in your organisation, showing their name, trigger type, status (enabled or disabled), and the number of recent executions.

2. Click “Create Workflow”

   Click the Create Workflow button in the top-right corner. This opens the workflow creation form.

3. Enter basic details

   Fill in the following fields:

   • Name — A human-readable name for the workflow, such as “New Employee Onboarding” or “Refund Request”. This is what your team will see in the workflow list.
   • Slug — A URL-friendly identifier that is auto-generated from the name. You can customise it if needed. The slug is used when triggering workflows via webhooks or the API.
   • Description — A brief summary of what the workflow does and when it should be used. This helps team members understand the purpose of the workflow at a glance.

4. Select a trigger type

   Choose how this workflow will be started:

   • Manual — Team members start the workflow by clicking “Run” from the Workflows page or from a conversation. You can optionally define input fields that the person must fill in when triggering the workflow (for example, “Employee name” and “Start date” for an onboarding workflow).
   • Event — The workflow starts automatically when a specific event occurs. Events come from inbound webhooks or integration triggers. Select the event source and optionally add filter conditions so the workflow only runs for matching events.
   • Schedule — The workflow runs on a recurring schedule. Choose a frequency (daily, weekly, monthly) and a time. For example, “Every Monday at 9:00 AM” for a weekly status report workflow.

   Note

   You can change the trigger type after creating the workflow, but you will need to reconfigure the trigger settings.

5. Add steps

   This is where you define what the workflow actually does. Click Add Step to create your first step, then configure it:

   • Step name — A clear description of what happens in this step, such as “Send welcome email” or “Check inventory levels”.
   • Assigned agent — Select which agent will carry out this step. The agent uses its persona, tools, and integrations to complete the task.
   • Instructions — Tell the agent exactly what to do in this step. Be specific — for example, “Using the Gmail integration, send a welcome email to the new employee at their personal email address. Include the start date, office location, and a link to the employee handbook.”
   • Step type — Choose the type of step. For most workflows, you will use Action steps (the agent performs a task). See Steps & Gates for details on all step types including conditions, forks, and joins.

   Repeat this process to add all the steps your workflow needs. Steps run in the order you define them (top to bottom), unless you add fork/join steps for parallel execution.

6. Configure gates for each step

   For each step, set the gate type that controls what happens after the step completes:

   • Auto — The workflow moves to the next step immediately. Use this for steps that do not need human oversight.
   • Review — The workflow pauses and notifies a reviewer. The reviewer can inspect the agent’s output, leave comments, and then allow the workflow to continue. Use this for quality checks.
   • Approval — The workflow pauses and requires explicit approval. An authorised person must click “Approve” or “Reject”. Use this for decisions with business impact, like approving a refund or publishing content.
   • Decision — The workflow pauses and the approver picks one of several named options. Each option routes the workflow down a different path. Use this when the next step depends on a human choice between several concrete outcomes.

   Every review, approval, and decision gate has a gate timing setting:

   • After (default) — The step runs first, then the gate reviews the output. Use for triage and after-the-fact quality checks.
   • Before — The gate runs before the step body, so a rejection prevents the step from executing at all. Use this for any step with external side-effects (sending email, charging a card, writing to an integration) so that rejection truly prevents the action.

   See Steps & Gates for full gate behaviour, approval context, and option descriptions.

   Tip

   Start with fewer gates and add more as needed. Too many approval steps can slow down your process. A good rule of thumb is to add approval gates only where the cost of an error is high.

7. Add typed output schemas (optional but recommended)

   For any step whose output feeds a condition, a decision gate, or a downstream step that expects specific fields, declare an output schema so the agent’s output is validated and typed at runtime. This catches silent type-mismatch bugs — for example, a string "true" flowing into a boolean condition.

   See Typed outputs for the full schema syntax and the strict / lenient / off strictness modes.

8. Save and enable the workflow

   Click Save to create the workflow. Sprigr Teams runs validation at save time — missing approvers on gates, dangling transitions, cycles in the DAG, fork/join mismatches, and decision gates with fewer than two options are caught before the workflow can be saved. Validation errors are shown inline; fix them and save again.

   By default, new workflows are created in a disabled state so you can review the configuration before it starts running. When you are ready, toggle the workflow to Enabled.

   For manual-trigger workflows, the “Run” button becomes available once the workflow is enabled. For event and schedule triggers, the workflow will start automatically when the next event or scheduled time occurs.

Try asking your agent

“Build a 3-step workflow called ‘Emergency Dispatch’: Step 1 — triage the incoming request and assess urgency. Step 2 — find the nearest available technician. Step 3 — send confirmation to the customer with the technician’s ETA.”

Creating workflows via chat or MCP

You do not have to build workflows by hand. Your companion agent (or any agent with the manage_team tool) can create, validate, and update workflows for you — just describe what you want in plain English. The same surface is available to external tools over MCP via create_workflow and update_workflow.

Both the chat and MCP paths accept the full DAG schema: step id and type (action, condition, fork, join, pipe), gateType with rich gateConfig (approver agent, justification template, option descriptions, expiry minutes, gate timing), conditions with field/operator/value triples, and explicit transitions. Missing step IDs are auto-generated and simple payloads (for example, a legacy requiresApproval: true) are mapped to the full schema automatically.

Ask an agent to validate_workflow before saving to run the same checks that the editor applies — cycles, dangling transitions, missing approvers, fork/join mismatches, and decision gates with too few options.

Editing an existing workflow

To edit a workflow, click its name on the Workflows page. You can modify the name, description, trigger settings, and steps at any time. Changes take effect for new executions only — any workflow that is currently running will continue with the original configuration.

Caution

Changing the trigger type or removing steps from an active workflow does not affect executions that are already in progress. However, it is good practice to disable the workflow before making significant structural changes, then re-enable it when you are done.

Duplicating a workflow

If you have a workflow that is similar to one you want to create, you can duplicate it. From the Workflows page, click the three-dot menu on the workflow card and select Duplicate. This creates a copy with all the same steps, gates, and settings. The duplicate is created in a disabled state so you can make changes before enabling it.

Deleting a workflow

To delete a workflow, click the three-dot menu and select Delete. You will be asked to confirm. Deleting a workflow does not delete its execution history — past executions and their results are preserved in the execution log.

Next steps

• Steps & Gates — Deep dive into all step types (action, condition, fork, join, pipe) and gate configurations.
• Workflow Execution — Learn how to monitor running workflows, handle failures, and review execution history.
• Inbound Webhooks — Set up webhooks to trigger workflows from external systems.