What to know before you Flow

Welcome to Flow! This article walks you through what you should know and agree on with your team before you start using Flow. Setting up a strong foundation of understanding of what Flow is, what your organization’s objectives are, and how Flow will help you grow is essential to a successful Flow journey.

Learn more about Flow

First, review what Flow is and how you can use it. There are a lot of options for you as you move forward—make sure you understand the basics and what options might suit you. 

Everyone’s Flow experience is different—no two organizations have the exact same goals, configurations, or outcomes. The more you know about what’s available in Flow, the better you can tailor your experience to your organization’s unique goals.

Here are some resources to get you started:

• Learn the basics about what Flow is and what Flow can help you do. It may sound like a simple place to start—especially since you've already started your Flow journey—but making sure you really know this, and that you've shared this information with the team that will be launching Flow in your organization, will help you stay on track.

• Learn more about how Flow can help you drive your business objectives forward (opens in new tab). Every organization has objectives they want to achieve—see how Flow can help you with yours.

• Learn from other customers. Each organization has their own objectives, goals, and challenges—and each organization that uses Flow has something to share about how it's driven them forward. Use Pluralsight's case studies (opens in new tab) as inspirations and reminders for what Flow can do for you.

Understand the goals of your organization

This is the most important part—Flow can only work if you have goals in mind, supported by a data-driven culture. So before you get started, take a moment to assess where you are in your journey.

Use these questions as a guide—the more you answer, the sooner you can see results with Flow:

• How is your organization currently using data to guide your conversations and engineering practices?

• Where is your data use going well? Where could it be improved?

• What are your initiatives and goals? When do you want to achieve them?

• Why do your goals matter to your organization?

• Do you have specific KPIs in mind for your organization?

• How might your teams react to Flow? Where will they be excited and where might they have concerns?

• Who are your best supporters in this journey? Who will you want to work with more to make sure they see the benefits?

• What are your measures of success? How will you know your initiatives are moving you in the right direction?

  • As a bonus—how do you think you can use Flow to help measure this progress?

This may seem like a lot of questions (and you probably don't have all the answers right now), but the more answers you have, the better you can shape your Flow experience toward your specific organization, teams, and goals. Flow works with you—the more we know about you and you know about yourself, the better Flow will work.

Understand how Flow works with you

Before we move on to getting Flow set up, there are a few things to know about how you'll be working with Flow

• It takes time to get Flow configured to match how you work. Not only does data ingestion require setup both in Flow and on your side, but you have several configuration choices to help your data best represent your workflows. It can take some time to have all configurations adjusted to your liking, and all data imported..

• Once Flow starts importing your data, you might find that you need to spend some time focused on your data hygiene in your git, PR, and ticketing systems. Flow ingests the data you have, so the better quality your data, the better insights Flow can provide. If you start using Flow and notice your data hygiene isn't where you want it to be, don't worry! That's a great opportunity to focus one of your first goals on getting better data into Flow.

• As your workflow and teams change and Flow builds new features, you'll want to keep an eye on how you're maintaining Flow. Later in the Admin Success Center, you'll see a maintenance agreement that will walk you through where to focus to make sure Flow continues to give you valuable data in the long run.

To understand how Flow works with your specific setup and use case, reach out to your Customer success manager or deployment consultant. They can help you understand how Flow configurations apply in your specific circumstances.

What's next

Once you understand Flow, your goals, and how the two work together, it's time to start setting up Flow and preparing for launch.