Thirty branches in the first week
Branches have been in the builder for two weeks, and in the first week most flows we were asked to review had more than 20. Each one matched a real reason a customer gets in touch.
The canvas makes a branch cheap to draw, but a list of intents is not a list of roads. Thirty branches is a phone tree with better manners: the customer has to be in exactly the right box before anything useful happens.
An intent is not a branch
The classifier at the top of a flow sorts what a customer wants. A branch is the path the work takes after that: the first question the agent asks, the sources it reads and the guardrail it answers to.
Branch where the work changes, not where the wording does. Customers ask for the same thing in many ways, and every one is headed down the same road.
A late parcel, a missing parcel and a parcel sent to an old address all start with the order number, read the same delivery policy and sit under the same credit limit. Draw them as three branches and you have drawn one road three times.
What a thread does in the thirty
One small desk ran a thirty-branch flow for its first week. Four branches took most of its 2,000 threads, and the other 26 saw about a dozen each.
Now follow one thread. A customer asks about a delivery fee on a parcel that never arrived, then asks for it to be resent, then corrects the address. The thread hops between a fee branch and a delivery branch, neither able to finish the job, and ends on a person’s screen.
Every hop is in the log, spread across branches too thin to read. Redrawn as three branches, the same desk sent one thread in ten to a person the next week, down from one in six.
Three, and a test for the fourth
Most floors end up with three: one for money, one for the order or the calendar, and one for a person. The classifier still knows every intent, and a customer who changes their mind stays on one road.
A fourth branch earns its place only if it asks a different first question, reads a different source or answers to a different guardrail. An outage branch passes, because it asks for the address first. Anything that fails all three is an intent inside a branch you already have.
What to do on your floor
Write the intents down before you draw, and group them by the first question the agent asks.
Split only where the source or the guardrail changes, never for a new phrasing of the question.
Read branch coverage the morning after you publish, and fold any branch too thin to trust into its neighbor.
Read the hops in the log. Two branches that keep trading threads were one branch all along.
A three-branch flow looks like very little on the canvas. It is also the flow a thread can get all the way through.
