Managed solution is not recommended for regular development lifecycle projects, as the future schema changes will be challenging. Managed solutions are good for redistributable components like CRM REST Builder, where author want to have full control & customizations are not allowed in those components as that may break future upgrades of that particular managed solution.
Still you can go ahead & create a standalone solution with your custom entities, then add a WF for that entity. Finally you can export as managed solution to import in other environments (usually only Prod). This way you can customize anytime in lower region like Dev/QA, but Prod can have managed solution & if anything goes wrong - deleting managed solution in Prod will wipe out components + data. You can change in Dev again & a fresh exported Managed solution can be imported in Prod.
Managed solution components cannot be directly customized.