Getting started with your first moment in Pyn
Pyn helps HR teams design and automate employee communications around the moments that matter (like onboarding, anniversaries, promotions, and manager transitions).
If you’re new to Pyn, don’t try to set everything up at once. The fastest way to see how Pyn works is to design your first moment end-to-end, even if you’re not ready to turn it on yet.
This guide walks you through designing your first automated flow using employee anniversaries. It should take about 10 minutes.
Start here: Your first moment
In Pyn, a moment is a specific point in the employee journey that you intentionally design and automate. Hence, people get the right guidance, message, or action at exactly the right time.
Anniversaries are a great first moment because they’re high-value to employees and require very little setup. Pyn includes ready-to-use templates for anniversaries.
Start in the Journey Map.
Find and click on the Anniversary moment
In the side panel, click Flows
Select the Anniversary celebration flow
At this point, you’re simply opening the flow so you can see how it’s structured.
Step 2: Review how the flow works
Before changing anything, take a moment to review the flow.
An anniversary flow is made up of:
A trigger (the employee’s start date)
One or more messages sent by Slack or email
Timing rules that control when messages are sent
Audience rules that define which employees the flow applies to
This is the core Pyn automations model: moment → flow → messages.
You don’t need to configure everything yet.
Step 3: Set the timing for the flow and its messages
Timing in Pyn happens in two layers. You’ll see both as you configure the anniversary flow.
Set when the flow runs (the trigger)
First, you’ll configure the trigger which is when this moment occurs.
For anniversaries the trigger is the employee’s start date. You will configure:
When the flow starts (for example, on the employee’s start date or one week before)
How often it runs (for anniversaries, this is typically every year, but a milestone anniversary may be every 5 years)
You can think of this as the rule that says:
“This person has reached their anniversary.”
Next: Set when each message is sent
Inside the flow, each message has its own timing.
When you click into a message, you’ll configure:
The schedule (for example, 7 days before the anniversary at 9:00am, in the recipient’s time zone)
Who the message is from and who it’s sent to
This controls how the moment shows up for people.
For now, you can review these settings without finalizing senders or schedules if you haven’t connected Slack or email yet.
Step 4: Review the audience for the flow and its messages
Audience configuration in Pyn happens in two layers.
At the trigger level, you’ll see audience rules that define which employees are eligible for this moment — in other words, who the flow applies to overall.
If you haven’t connected your HRIS yet, it’s normal to see an empty audience or limited filters. At this stage, you’re defining the logic of the flow, even if employee data isn’t connected yet.
At the message level, each message has its own audience settings. These control who is eligible to receive that specific message (for example, an employee or their manager), without changing who the flow applies to.
For your first pass, you don’t need to change these unless something looks obviously off. Once employee data is available, the audience preview will automatically populate based on the rules you’ve set.
If you’d like a deeper explanation of lifecycle groups and include/exclude logic, you can learn more here:
Step 5: Open the first message
Now click into the first message in the flow. Here you can see how messages work in Pyn:
How the message is structured and formatted
Where you can add images or visual elements
How employee details can be inserted automatically with tokens
How conditional sections can tailor messages for different audiences
Pyn’s anniversary templates are designed to work out of the box, so most teams either leave them as-is or make light edits.
Optional: If you’ve already connected Slack or email, you can use the beaker icon to send yourself a test message. If not, you can skip this for now.
Final step: Activate the flow (when you’re ready)
Once you’re happy with the design, you can activate the flow.
Before turning it on, you’ll need to come back and finish a few required setup steps:
Connect a sender (Slack or email)
Connect employee data (HRIS or manually enroll employees)
Confirm the audience rules for the flow
Confirm the audience, sender and recipient settings for each message
When everything is in place, just click Use this to activate the flow!
Many teams design their first moment first and return later to complete setup once integrations are in place.
You just designed your first flow! 🎉
By completing these steps, you’ve:
Designed your first moment in Pyn
Seen how moments, flows, and messages work together
Learned the core pattern you’ll use to design and automate any employee moment