Workflow builder for anyone who understands data can build and fix
COMPANY
5X DATA
YEAR
2025
STATUS
Shipped to 20+ clients
ROLE
Product designer and product lead - I owned scope, design, and shipping decisions
Try the live prototype
See how the final product behaves and works
5X is an all-in-one data platform for growing startups. You bring data in, model it and get a report that you can take business decisions on. Orchestration decides what runs when (For example: refresh the customer model every Sunday, then score churn) and what happens when a step fails. In early 2025, 5X decided to stop selling point tools and become the whole platform. Orchestration was the missing piece.
Impact
20+ clients used the workflow builder and ditched external services they used before
Internal data team at 5X adapted the workflow builder and kept bringing more innovation
Workflow builder later became a core part of our sales demo and contributed to highest usage
Problem
BUSINESS PROBLEM
5X was deemed to become an all in one data platform. It had ingestion, transformation and a business intelligence layer built in. But one key layer of the entire data model, the orchestration/workflow layer was not yet on 5X and this is the layer where data teams spend most of their day. Running it elsewhere made 5X one tool among several, and the easiest one to replace.
HOW I KNEW
I was part of onboarding calls where our customers kept asking the same question. Our design partners and founders described switching to an external service is distracting. They used to ask "If this is where my data arrives, how do I work with it? Do I need Dagster or Windmill?".
My role
I took the founder's brief and defined what the MVP of Orchestration should look like. I designed the interaction model, the core flows, the end-to-end prototype and shipped it with an engineer on the team. I cut short some of the features, mainly some triggers - webhook and Pull requests, tasks like parallel job runs and configuration of compute profiles from v1 to ship this in 4 weeks. I also wrote the specs for the engineering team and ran QA alongside the engineer who built it. Eventually, when we shipped orchestration, it became part of our sales pitch to potential clients.
Key decisions
A visual node graph to build a workflow. Non technical users prefer visual interfaces with all the information laid out in hierarchy.
Show Job runs alongside the Editor. The primary action is to see the performance of the last runs once the job is saved and published.
Added draft and live modes. Once the job is saved, users can make new changes and test them without affecting the live job.
DECISION 1
A visual node graph to build a workflow
Non-technical users needed to see what runs after what, at a glance. They can't see steps or even recognise them from a command line interface or a table-based interface. I researched the libraries we could use (we used Reactflow here), the shape it can take and how we should ship it.
DECISION 2
A place to see the runs immediately, as well as edit the job
Whenever a pipeline breaks, a user has to see the all the past runs, diagnose what went wrong and most likely edit the flow. I figured out we required an effortless way to let users switch between job runs and the editor itself.
DECISION 3
Added draft and live modes
After releasing the MVP, I realised our internal data team had to duplicate every job so that they can make and test their changes without affecting the live job. I realised this is crucial and within weeks, we published a draft and live mode.
TL;DR
PROBLEM
5X could currently do ingestion, which is essentially copying data from one source to another destination. To chain jobs that contains multiple steps, customers had to leave the 5X platform and use external workflow services like Dagster or Windmill.
WHAT I DID
I scoped v1 down to what users required, then spent time on a solution to see how workflows connect, along with alerts that work across the platform. Shipped in 8 weeks with one engineer.
RESULT
20+ customers ran their pipelines entirely on 5X. No Dagster, no Windmill service that the user has to log into. It later became a core part of our default sales demo.