Stages Are the Building Blocks of Procly
Stage noun
A step in a process or workflow.
Also: a raised platform for performance — where the action unfolds in the spotlight.
A Stage is more than a step — it's a performance. In theater, every stage has two sides: the spotlight for the audience, and the behind the curtain for the crew. Every great production needs a Stage.
Your customers step into a clean, focused experience — the front stage — crafted as its own micro-frontend application. Behind it: your team works behind the curtains with complete backstage access to the same live data, advanced tools, audit trails, and orchestration controls. Each Stage lives independently yet performs in perfect harmony with the whole production. No more fragmented apps or disjointed portals. Just elegant separation of concerns — front stage magic for users, backstage mastery for your crew.
Procly is software that orchestrates Stages. Stages are the steps of your workflow or process wrapped in Procly magic that links them together to create powerful, secure, and scalable processes.
A stage can be one of the built in Procly Stages like Basic Stage, Email Conversation, Form Data Collect, File Upload, Calendar Schedule, Code Stage, AI Prompt, Webhook, External Service Stage, etc. Or it can be a custom Stage that you create yourself.
Stages are self contained small units of execution that handle a single step in your workflow or process. On top of just executing the step they add additonal layers on top:
- 👀Visibility - Each stage has internal and external visibility which can be controlled and customized. Internally you see everything that happens in the stage, and you can control what external users see. Either they see nothing, the status of that stage (started, in progress, paused, completed, failed), or a UI to take action on the stage, like submit some data in a form, upload a file, pick a date from a calendar, etc.
- Data management - Stages can read and write data from the task running in their stage. Data in Procly is stored in something like an advanced spreadsheet. A Task is like a row in the spreadsheet, and that row has fields which are like columns. A Stage is given permission to read certain columns from a single row at a time. Which means that data access by Stages is highly controlled and secure. Stages see only what they need and nothing more.
- 🔒Security - Stages are secure by design. Stages provide a level of isolation that contains, control, and tracks what happens inside each stage. Code runs in a hermetic sandbox with no access to the outside world except for what is explicitly allowed. All outside access is tracked and logged. For AI stages the AI agent is contained and controlled to only see and touch things in your infrastructure this is explicitly allowed.
- 👍Approvals - Stages can be configured to require human approval before they can be completed. This is a great way to ensure that critical tasks, especially Stages performed by AI agents, are reviewed and approved by the right people before they are completed.
- 💬Discussion and Activity - every stage is like its own slack channel for the team to discuss the task and the progress of each stage. Highly organized, focused, and secure. Within each stage all activity is also logged and can be easily viewed and the history audited.
- 🔔Alerting - If or when something goes wrong in a stage, Procly has built in alerting and you can be alerted and take action to fix it in different ways based on severity. You can also be alerted when something goes right, like when a stage is completed successfully, or based on one of many different event types.
- Metrics, insights, and time tracking - Procly does the heavy lifting of tracking the metrics, insights, and time tracking for you, so you can focus on the business and the process, and let Procly manage these for you. Get insights into your process and see where you can improve. Track things like lead time, bottlenecks, error rates, and more.
- Control flow - Stages become part of a workflow with different paths and decision points, but inside each stage you don't need to worry about the control flow. You just focus on the step you need to perform. Less code means less bugs and less maintenance.