Designing an admin panel with add/edit/delete products option

I am creating a custom admin backend for my website in Laravel.

I have several categories and sub categories of products that I would like to add/edit and delete in the backend.

I have around 10 categories now. Each category, in turn, contains a couple of subcategories. Products under one category/subcategory will have a completely different set of options/specifications than a product under a different category. So the form for adding a new product will be unique for each category/subcategory.

These are the 2 workflows that I have in mind :

Workflow 1

Admin Logs in

Clicks on Products tab on the left

Display list of products with add, edit, delete buttons on top.

On clicking Add New, a separate page will open which will have a drop down with a label 'Select Category'.

On selecting, let's say category A, a second drop-down will appear below the first with all the subcategories auto-populated.

On selecting a subcategory, a form will appear with options like Product name, Price, specifications etc.

Workflow 2

Admin logs in

Clicks on Products

Clicks Add new product

A separate page will open where the product categories are displayed.

On selecting a category, another page will open which will display all the subcategories.

On selecting a subcategory, a separate page with the form for adding a new product will be displayed.

Which of these workflows do you think would be more user-friendly? With the first workflow, with all the ajax stuff going on, I am worried whether it becomes confusing for the admin once the number of categories and products goes up in future and also whether the code will become complicated.