recently service now announced Creator Studio as a developer you probably have questions about what it is why we built it and what's in it for you in this episode we talk to someone who can provide answers welcome to breakpoint the service now developer podcast hello service now admins Builders developers and of course all of the Curious individuals that I always say with the utmost love and respect welcome to or welcome back to breakpoint the service now developer podcast where we bring you the latest tools tips and trade graft to accelerate your career my name is Chu tamasi senior developer Advocate and I am joined as always by the one and only senior developer Advocate Lauren McManaman how are you today Lauren Hey doing fantastic Chuck how about yourself off to a good start as always it could be 11 pm at night and I'll say I'm off to a good start so starting something right true well Lauren I'm excited because we have with us a returning guest yes always a good sign yeah senior director of product management Chris hos how are you today Chris oh I'm always great when I'm talking to you and Lauren Chuck and we always like talking to you too about what's cool what's hot what's coming up you are a huge help for our creator conon Keynotes so before we go any further thank you thank you for all of that took an army and you were among the generals absolutely you guys did an amazing job it was just a honor and pleasure to watch you guys from the from the audience this year amazing can I watch from the audience Lauren it looks so much [Laughter] easier well Chris you're a returning guest so welcome back to breakpoint and you've done an intro once before but in case somebody missed that episode why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself sure Chuck yes uh Chris hos product for the app engine business here at service now I've actually been with the company gosh it'll be nine years next month which is just mindblowing nice um my background is in engineering I actually started at service now as an engineer and then I switched over into product management about a year into my tenure so um I've worked all over itsm platform app engine developer experience so I've worked on all kinds of products uh agent workspace classic lists new lists guided app creator app engine Studio Creator Studio CLI my goodness I just can't believe I've done all that so anyway uh that's my background at service now and again I lead the product team for app engine and we are building amazing things for our developer community and uh I just love what we're doing and excited to talk about Creator studio today that gives you quite the perspective you gunning for Pat Casey's job no one can ever do for c p job no chance well Chris we've got a new question that came along since the last time we talked to you we like to get a little insight to people's careers can you tell us a story about a time you did something you could it's usually way back when when you were new but not always something you thought you would get fired for and what did you learn from that experience okay I'm actually gonna tell you about two so the first as long as it's not you know HR related related doesn't relate to service now at all which is good so perfect uh so when I was 16 I worked for an electronics company who shall rename nameless as they are a a customer of service now good good call and unfortunately I did abuse my my uh employee discount and was caught you know buying things at cost and so in that regard yes I did I did lose my my job as a 16-year-old so um that was unfortunate but uh great job as as always but um the other one was of course I think this relates or many developers can relate to this but uh everyone at some point in their engineering career just doesn't want to wait and go through the process of getting the slightest little change out into production so yes uh definitely updating stored procedures live in production um many many moons ago to just fix a tiny B was definitely something I easily could have been fired for uh I was caught and you had the wrist slapped but since I didn't break anything uh I was able to to keep my job so good story good lesson yeah I feel like all developers at one point have gone what I'm so I can just do this on live I can just do this on PR it'd be so fast like it's it's such a tempting thing sometimes it's one line it's one line one line yeah what can happen don't drop tables or anything like that no never exactly and also in addition to this uh when you're not at work what do you enjoy doing it's a fantastic question so I'm a I'm a father of a seven-year-old girl and so a lot of what we do revolves around her so she is the absolute love of my life uh so not at work you know it's usually just playing with her uh writing scooters at the park going to the beach swim practice those types of things uh I'm also a big Fitness Enthusiast so I absolutely love training all things nutrition Health all that stuff so if I'm not in the gym I'm probably watching a YouTube about how to train better at the gym or how to eat better so that's where a lot of my time goes W that doesn't fit with the generic developer ethos you you do you hey we're moving away from that that stereotype Ching our way yeah we we're not doing Cheetos in Mountain Dew anymore I hope not I really hope if anything Apple kind of helped with that by giving you white keyboards you know one never thought of that Advantage all right let's dive right into it let's talk about Creator Studio Chris uh first can you explain what it is and perhaps what it's not oh absolutely well to to explain what it is let me just talk about like what our original Vision was for creater studio so obviously you know folks listening in they understand like service now is a very powerful platform so many things you can do with it uh so many you know so much flexibility and so when we sort of embarked on a journey of trying to get more people to build on this platform who perhaps weren't as technically Savvy we realized that there's this all this complexity that's involved in building something so simple on the platform is really hard for people to use so we decided to build create Studio has a very guard railed experience for creating the most common types of apps that are purpose-built for service now and with that our first version just released a couple weeks ago we really focused on enabling our users to build what we call the service request app and this is the bread and butter of service now the bread and butter of service management it is a a form sitting in your catalog that you submit and some automation runs behind the scenes and you fulfill those requests uh using service now as well so you wouldn't believe well actually this audience absolutely would believe just how many steps are involved in creating something that sounds so simple so with with Creator Studio we have really really streamlined that process for building that types of that type of app so as a user you're really you're not focused on what table to use uh which automation product to use you're focused on building a form building the steps that should happen when that thing is submitted and simply just configuring a fulfillment experience super super easy so that's kind of the why we built it and and what it is right now and again our original our vision is still holding true and that we want to create or enable additional experiences within Creator Studio that help you build similar types of simple apps maybe it's a simple uh spreadsheet based app or something like that but again want to remove all the complexities out of that thing so typical not typical but non-technical users can be successful on this amazing platform yeah I'm thinking in my head when I started back in 2008 how many steps it was to do what you just described you know a record producer a table the acl's import sets transform maps all just ACL the menu options the the just I yeah you had to pick an icon back then but there's no more icons on the menu option but just crazy crazy amount of details Auto numbering of the records the number maintenance was not a simple checkbox that we used to have to do there were so many steps people like Jay bensson will back me up on this he's been using it a bit longer than I have we found somebody at knowledge who's been using it even longer than that which I think she started about 2006 God bless her so these types of tools are not just a boon to what I'll call the Phyllis of the world those who know the Fred luy story about Phyllis and you know the the the non-technical people in your organization but an accelerator for the the technical people who do encounter these requests you may not have uh a citizen Development Center of Excellence set up and your epds your it Department whomever is still tasked with doing these things that's right this is an accelerated way of doing those yeah absolutely so look like our Target persona for building this of course was more that non-technical user because that is essentially where where the Market's going and where companies need to uh invest which is enabling more of the business users we call shifting left and enabling them to actually create and manage their own Solutions but like you said like there is absolutely nothing preventing someone in the IT department who is bangging these things out every day from utilizing this product to help accelerate what they do today so that's a that's a great call out Chuck how do customers get it fantastic question so it is available through the store it's been available in the store for the last two weeks uh so you can download it from there it does come with H or is provided through the app engine license so you do need to be an app Eng customer to utilize Creator Studio but I do have good news uh we are working right now on getting this available on pdis later this year very exciting that's a mic drop moment for this podcast that's great go and I wouldn't have said it if they didn't confirm that it is in the backlog so you fervently messaging your team on the sideline just to make sure it's true that's awesome as someone that used to so I used to obviously be on the solution consultant side of of engine Studios kind of bandwidth right it was a sort of other projects but one we spent a lot of time speaking with customers about was app engine studio and I I have to draw attention to the fact that the messaging around the products is a little bit similar right we are targeting lower coat or people that have an interest in development but from a lower code perspective it's there to kind of streamline the development process but still make it available in a deeper Place through things like the service the larger service style Studio or like the undercarriage um like actual dictionary entities right that you could edit so how what how is there a differing Persona that you're targeting for Creator Studio than something like AES yeah great question so the simple answer is the Persona is mostly the same so what we noticed with app engine Studio when we released it three years ago is that when we talked to customers and we also uh saw what they were actually creating uh we saw they were creating these simple service request apps right and this just became a common theme we saw customers wanting to get their feet W with citizen development with these types of simple apps and that's what they were were building the most of an app engine Studio but we also heard from the same customers that hey it's still a little too hard because you give us all the great Lego blocks but we still have to kind of figure out how to put those together right building a table a t making sure it's extends from task uh understanding what a record producer is and how it maps to tables so we saw that as a phenomenal opportunity for us to even uh you know lower that bar even further by creating something like Creator Studio which streamlined the creation of these types of very like service now Bread andb Butter apps so yeah same Persona just making it even easier for them to do the types of things that they're really looking to do and what is the the largest difference I mean obviously it builds a lot more on the the back end but comparing it also to something like catalog Builder which is which also kind of got a nice facelift in the last couple of releases too so it looks very expanded capability wise so what's the biggest difference you would say between those two as well yeah so catalog biller is a great product right and you know some there are some key technical differences to to Creator studio and catalog Builder one uh stud focuses mostly on are just record producers while catalog Builder enables you to build both catalog items and record producers so that's a key technical difference right but our goal with Creator Studio that wasn't being met with catalog Builder that catalog Builder is sort of that uh that point in time builder for when you're building a holistic app um you utilize catalog build to kind of build that one aspect of it and you need to do all that pre-work ahead of time you need to build that table that your record producer is going to map to you need to then go into flow designer or process automation designer and build your automation then you need to go into UI Builder and build your fulfillment experience so kab Builder was a nice fit into that end to-end process but we saw an opportunity Creator Studio to sort of streamline that entire end to end and so Creator coo takes care of all that grunt work right we create the table for you we create the fulfiller role for you all you have to do is worry about is designing the form we create a workspace for you behind the scenes all you have to do is worry about is configuring the lists you have uh the new playbook designer there to easily build out your automation so that's really the the key difference is that endtoend experience that Creator Studio offers versus that sort of point in time I just need to do this one task with this one Builder are there any best practices for onboard in people to Creator Studio that's a great question so I would um I would answer that by Persona right so as a as an admin when you're setting up Creator studio um there are some great the best practices one you want to get in there and you want to utilize our guided setup to get the product set up and um and uh allocate the role that people will need to build get into Creator Studio you also want to set up the pipeline feature so this is a feature that Creator studio integrates with where you can actually set up a deployment pipeline uh from your sub production to your prod so you want to get in there and and uh utilize that setup process you'll also want to um take note that we integrate with catalog templates and so you'll want to take note of like what your template strategy is going to be and make sure that you create the appropriate templates for your users to use while they're in Creator Studio so the way I like to frame an app in Creator studio is think of it as a departmental app so the marketing department will have one app the legal department and within those apps they'll create all their different forms and services so if you think about it that way you'll want to do a little bit of planning as far as how you want to uh create and organize your catalog templates so they work well and are um assigned to the right types of users so they can be successful so that's on the ad ins side and on the uh user side we have some phenomenal documentation we really took our time with the docs for Creator studio and we even sort of changed our tone tone of voice uh in the documentation so we're actually talking to the user and rather than sort of technical it person so read the docs they're they're really fantastic and it will definitely guide the user as to what Creator studio is how to use it how to be successful fantastic it's got me excited to test out for myself now as someone that's built a lot of those type of I mean that was pretty much my first year when I joined when I was a customer was building departmental service related apps for the marketing department um at the time for our very small oneperson HR department right um so conceptually I know the types of application files that make up those apps when someone builds a Creator Studio application what is actually being created on their behalf like what what things would be represented in the larger service now studio for people to further spring off of yeah let me let me walk you through it from the first step so when you create an app in Creator Studio it's being created in a scope brand new scope care of all that um each application gets a new taxk extended table and so that's all done for you when you create the application now once you're within the app and you're building a form what you're doing is you're building a record producer that maps to that table that we created within your app and then you can create multiple forms within this application all of them map to the same table so again the user is just focusing on creating the actual request form so that's getting created uh also when you create the app we create a fulfiller role so some a role that you can then give to a group of people like the legal group or the Marketing Group for them to actually do the Fulfillment of those tasks when they get submitted so that all happens when you create the application so we got a table fulfiller role uh with Creator Studio you get a default workspace that just comes with the product and so every Creator studio app utilizes that workspace and each app just simply creates a copy of the table of the of the lists that you'll be able to utilize for fulfilling those requests in the workspace um and that's kind of all the goodness that comes just from creating one uh Creator studio app and again the user never has to understand any of of those components and how they work together that is fascinating I also really like how reporting I mean as someone that has done like rep uh you know like it's I guess it's kind of a form of like working backwards right of like these are the metrics we'd like to track having that builds already into the process to see the immediate impact of people's work using their application is very very smart I really like that component especially right cool oh we've talked about this a little bit but I want to hear from you what is the compatibility between Creator studio and the other development environments we have EP engine studio and the traditional Dev Studio Etc yeah great question so when we started this journey interoperability between all of our various developer products was priority number one um because we learned from customers is that they start a lot of their applications as these simple request based apps but then once they actually start taking off they start adding all kinds of Integrations and additional workflows to those apps so we made sure that we built whatever got built in Creator Studio was built on the same blocks as any other application so again Scopes tables playbooks all that good stuff so that means that once you sort of Hit the max that you can take your application in Creator Studio you just open that thing up an app engine Studio Dev studio and the future service now studio and just take that thing further and the beauty of it is they're bidirectional so if you do something in a higher product service now or Creator studio will continue to work with that application and if you did something that just isn't quite compatible maybe you added a an activity to your automation that we don't understand we're smart enough to tell you that hey you modifi this elsewhere and uh we're no longer compatible you need to continue in that higher level product you beat me to my next question that was gonna be that was my next question too yeah that's that's very clever the man knows his audience yes that's a really clever addition because that was that's something that's been reflected in other products of the past is like we've oh we've grown but the B directionality isn't sometimes always showcase so that's that's rad I know that you covered it and your team has covered it a bit at knowledge but for the people that didn't get the the opportunity to go or haven't caught up yet in all the the on demand versions of the content do you have any hints I know it just came out so it seems kind of selfish to ask but do you have any hints what's on the road map for cre Safe Harbor safe har yeah well of course yes we uh we've got a very um aggressive Rive road map so Creator Studio again is distributed through the store and so we will be releasing four times a year on a quarterly Cadence and over the next two quarterly releases so that' be August and November this year uh there are some uh additional catalog features that will be ensuring a part of Greater Studio like catalog policies support for question sets uh support for topic assignments so those are going to come up really quick also on the automation side we want to make sure that customers can create their own custom activities and make sure that those are part of the activity pallet uh because we do know about 30% of uh workflows out there do contain custom activity so that'll be coming up in a quick release uh this year and then looking a little bit more into the future but not too far out of course is going to be enhancing the experience with generative AI so for for those that are in the know and have SE the headlines and knowledge we've released some great new features as part of Creator Pro Plus so some of those are catalog generation and Playbook generation so using natural language and theni to generate those so we're going to pull those features into Creator studio so customers can or developers can utilize natural language to create their catalog forms and automations wow very nice eyes on 25 for sure uh Chris what are the takeaways or the walkway points you'd like to make for this audience uh that's a great question I would say get started now so you know we really built Creator Studio to enable the non-technical users the business users the citizen developers if you want to call them that um get started now work with your business users get them to get into the product to touch it to try to build out forms uh and to really kind of learn uh how to go about doing it because the biggest blocker to really enabling your business isn't going to be the product it's going to be your your process like your culture around citizen development so the more you or the faster you start working with your business users and get them acquainted with service now acquainted with Creator studio uh the faster you're going to be able to innovate as a company so definitely get in there try it kick the tires and give us feedback and let us know how we can improve the product for the sake of getting people's hands on the product is there a hard date for when it will be available on PD or at least maybe a general of course The Advocates will be sure to to bump that news on socials when it is available but did you have an estimate perhaps I I don't uh the best estimate I can give you is definitely by the end of the year I am in the back okay and uh so that means I know it'll get there by the end of the year nice yeah I know that when you talk about deployments or or getting your your the rest of your organization on board something we do with products is is often have a lighthouse customer or a series of Lighthouse customers yet that's another approach that could work really well is you onboard that first one as a shining example look what we did for the legal department in a week you know or something of that nature that that could uh you know help spread the word in the organization then you have an internal advocate in legal going yeah everybody should be using this yeah absolutely that's a phenomenal idea Chuck and we've seen a lot of customers become very successful by by really working tightly with a certain Department within the organization thank you very much for joining us today Chris before we leave can you let the listener know how they can get in touch with you should they have questions yeah absolutely so you can get in touch with me on LinkedIn you can easily find me Chris hos I'm LinkedIn uh you can also uh email me directly chris. service now.com always looking to hear from our developers and our customers and uh keep that feedback coming please we'll have links in the show notes of course and thank you wonderful listener for joining us today don't forget you can find many other service Now podcast over on the community under service now.com community in the events menu you can subscribe to this one or all of them if you choose to get them automatically delivered to you breakpoint is brought to you by serice now executive producers would be me and Lauren and if you want to find out more about the service now developer program well we invite you to head over to developer. serv.com where you can get a free PDI AKA personal developer instance for your very own to try and use and experiment and wipe and it's just a whole lot of fun it's your own sandbox where you can learn and explore and grow and soon soon we will have Creator Studio on there for you again thank you so much Chris for sharing with us today thank you Chuck thank you Lauren please let us know what you think about this podcast you can leave feedback or ask questions in the service now Community for more great information on service now development check out the service now developer portal at developer. servis now.com thanks for listening wait where did Lauren go I'm near Dallas it looks spooky any questions before we begin nope okay well technically we already began that was a trick question huh we'll put in the we'll put in the safe harbor clax in there do you have a date for sorry go ahead for for well thank you for joining of us knew I'd have to screw up something somewhere you can subscribe to this one or all of them to get them automatically okay that's two but that's the second reference to colonoscopies today in binary if you shift left your bits multiply by two