By Priyanshu Singh
The atmosphere during Maker Day at Glific was electric. Everyone arrived with an idea, ready to build, and the energy in the room was contagious as concepts rapidly turned into working prototypes.
I decided to tackle something that wasn’t a massive structural overhaul but was a long-standing, highly requested quality-of-life improvement for our users: a “Copy Node” feature inside the Flow Editor.
The Spark of an Idea
It started as a simple experiment. I had spent the previous sprint exploring the codebase, chatting with the product team, Sangeeta, and Noopur to gather insights. By the end of Maker Day, I had a functional prototype that let users duplicate a node within the same flow.
Everyone was thrilled. The feature felt small, but the problem it solved for NGOs was massive—saving them countless repetitive clicks.
But to be honest? I wasn’t satisfied yet.
The real holy grail was copying a node from one flow to an entirely different flow. That part felt incomplete, and I knew I could do more.
Demo link – https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ENBhI45Vq5Iywa8kL7OEADpZtYEsVy1Q/view?usp=drive_link
Enter The Secret Santa Challenge 🎅🛸
Around that time, during our Secret Santa exchange, I asked Tejas for an iPhone cover or a remote-controlled helicopter. He immediately started teasing me: “Are you a kid?”
But I really wanted that helicopter. So, Tejas threw down a gauntlet:
“If you can manage to copy a node from one flow to another, I will buy you both.”
Challenge accepted.
I spent the next few days diving deep into the Flow Editor code. After a lot of digging, experimenting, and leveraging Redux and local storage, I found a breakthrough. I cracked the second part of the problem and had a working cross-flow prototype.
The Long Road to Production
Building the prototype was one thing; getting it to production was a whole different journey.
Because of shifting and unclear requirements, the Pull Request (PR) sat in draft status for nearly 3 to 5 months. It was frustrating, but I didn’t let it drop. I kept pushing for clarity, asking for the exact requirements so I could bring this feature to life.
Finally, last month, the green light came. I seized the chance to prove myself. I completely rewrote the code from scratch to satisfy every single requirement cleanly and robustly.
“There may be a delay, but justice will prevail”
I was nervous about getting it absolutely perfect after all those months in draft, but I refused to let doubt hold me back. With incredible support, rigorous testing, and invaluable suggestions from Fawas and Tejas , we finally deployed it to production. This feature literally wouldn’t have reached the finish line without them.
The Impact: Seeing It In Action
We didn’t just ship the feature; we built an entire analytics dashboard to track its usage, updated the documentation within days
Doc link – https://glific.github.io/docs/docs/Product%20Features/Copy%20and%20Paste%20Node/#quick-reference
Dashboard link – https://us.posthog.com/project/425159/dashboard/1774947
The response has been incredible. Seeing the dashboard light up with data and watching NGOs actively use something I built from scratch is an incredibly rewarding feeling
Lessons Learned: The Power of Small Ideas
What started as a rough Maker Day idea and a playful bet for a childhood toy ended up becoming my first end-to-end feature deployment. Looking back, this journey taught me a few profound lessons that I want to share with anyone hesitant about their own ideas:
- Never hesitate to share your ideas, no matter how small they seem. Everyone around you might think it’s just a minor tweak, but you never know how deeply it will solve a problem until it’s in the hands of the users.
- Small things create massive changes. In product development, you don’t always need to reinvent the wheel. Often, it’s the compounding effect of tiny, thoughtful improvements that completely transform how people interact with a product.
- Persistence pays off. A drafted PR isn’t a dead end. Keep pushing, keep asking for clarity, and when the opportunity comes, rewrite it until it shines.
“The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.”
A huge thank you to everyone and ishan my mentor who helped me test, refine, and ship this!
