How are you using Airtable to power your product operations?

[Jordan_Scott1]

We’ve seen organizations all around the world use Airtable to power their product development processes to gather insights, improve efficiency, and drive results. From analyzing customer feedback to aligning on team objectives and tracking product roadmaps, we have loved seeing your workflows - and we would love to learn more.

Use this thread to tell the community how you or your organization are using Airtable across your product teams, share resources you found helpful, Universe templates that inspired you, or just share some of your favorite tips and tricks you’ve learned along your journey so that we can share your knowledge with other users who may just be getting started.

We really appreciate it, and can’t wait to hear what you’ve been up to!

[Databaser]

Some use cases in short :point_down: I have the perception that Airtable thinks that Airtable is 90% being used by marketing and product teams (and all the marketing focused promo doesn’t help :upside_down_face: ), so this seems like a very useful topic.

client in HVAC business

• import project data from building ERP
• manage planning for project leaders and technicians
• manage operational flows: car park, maintenance and reparations on tools, …
• manage project related to do’s company wide
• manage warehouse flow, including automatic orders according to stock levels
• overview of product portfolio and their inherent data
• HR, including personal data, training approval flow, vacation approval flow, registration of sick days and the dashboards (luckily still more than 10 possible :roll_eyes: ) that goes along with it
• manage separate workflows with international engineers
• manage availability of subcontractors
• overview of financial metrics
• manage client interventions after sale
• …

client in international event business

• overview of all events with inherent data
• managing a artist database, including related agencies data
• overview of event program
• managing to do’s company wide
• managing logistics: flights, shuttles, hotels, ground transportation, …
• managing financial agreements: fee, booking fee, buy outs, agency fee, …
• managing budget versus actual spendings
• managing both internal en external support: stage manager, security, …
  …

client in multi media sector with 15+ specific websites and 15+ dedicated medical newsletters

• CRM: advertising companies, medical companies, medical authors, …
• managing advertising space in different forms and option for those websites and newsletters
• overview of financial in and outs
• …

client in parcel acquirement business

• overview of available parcels
• managing communication with parcel owners over a longer period of time
• managing sales goals versus actuals
• managing acquisition team to do’s
• …

client in education business

• overview of internal and external trainers and agreements
• overview of trainings product portfolio
• full booking system
• managing financial flow in & outs
• …

engineering firm

• managing workflow and to do’s for 10+ engineers accross 5+ disciplines (HVAC, architecture, …)
• overview financial metrics, including recalculating project costs, …
• managing operational flows: car park and fuel usages, maintenance, …
• HR, including time registration, assignment of labor costs, …
• …

etc, etc.

[Hendrik_Yang]

We are basically building ERP inside Airtable to manage:

1. Production, Production Schedule
2. BOM and COGS
3. Inventory
4. Supply Chain
5. Profitability

I do hope there is direct integration with QuickBooks Online and XERO (without using zapier, integromat, etc)

[David_Solimini]

Great prompt!

I lead a team at a foreign affairs think tank in Washington, DC. As a nonprofit, AT is attractive because of the nonprofit discount, ease of onboarding, and flexibility to easily create a new base to address new use cases as they come up.

We use Airtable for a number of essential functions:

• Publishing pipeline. We publish a wide range of policy products, all of which need to go through a 14 stage process of drafting, review and approval, compliance checks, launch planning, publishing, etc. (This use case is best categorized as academic publishing.)
• Social media content. We use AT for social content production and review, to flag content to policy teams for potential issues, and track metrics. (Content creation)
• Mass email. We track our mass email in-flight and requests as well as performance metrics. (Publishing, Measurement & Evaluation)
• Media coverage. Saving and reporting on news coverage and placed media. (Measurement & Evaluation)
• Stakeholder/subscriber data management. Staff requests to add subscribers to email products start in AT where they are screened and then pushed into our CRM via Zappier. (Data management)
• Systems administration We will soon be using AT to track which people have which permissions on which public-facing systems, the associated risk levels and required mitigations for that account. (IT management)
• Shared data. AT data is the canon version of org-wide info such as the list of programs and their related projects, staff who are involved in policy content creation, onboarding and offboarding status, and a few other things. (
• Team To-Dos. Our day to day work is tracked in AT as well. (project management)

We also use it on an adhoc basis to:

• Manage tasks on large standalone projects. Things like building a new website or building out a new program.
• Roadmap for our tech tools and related dependencies.

We hope to use AT/Interfaces to augment a number of these functions, including:

• Extending the production pipeline to track all deliverables, cradle to grave. This will require many more staff to have AT accounts and use interfaces, so we are hoping for a ‘portal’ access option for Interfaces, and we will require the ability to add records in Interfaces.
• Diversity Equity and Inclusion ensuring we are meeting our goals for inclusion in public facing events (Measurement & Evaluation).

In general, Airtable was the tool that made it possible for us to scale production to meet internal and external demand as the organization has grown and the pandemic forced everyone to be digital-first.

[Allen_Moldovan]

Testing Inspection and Certification Company here. We test consumer products(cell phones, rugs, plumbing, building materials, strollers, etc). Think restricted chemicals, flammability, mechanical hazards ETC. All methodologies performed are to industry and regulatory standards. We have over 30,000 employees in ourconsumer products division.

I am using Airtable to build out product level test protocols and manage changes to the industry standards and regulations they cite.

I wish page designer were better, it is an absolute headache to send protocol documents to our customers. Most of my day is spent reformatting CSV’s and adjusting table heights in page designer to create presentable documents.

[Graham_Lindsay]

Market Gardens work flow; Planting, fertilising, spraying, harvesting etc
Inventory Tracking and purchasing, projects and materials.
Staff (16) safety equipment (OHS) and chemical use.
Orchard (2500 trees) identification in row and position, date of harvest, quantity harvest, chemical use and fertilising applications.
Seed bank tracking; pest and disease monitoring
Airtable has changed the way I manage all aspects of my role as supervisor.

[Zach_Felsenstei]

Zach here from Airtable - neat to hear how folks power their product ops. :100:

I make Airtable workflows for our product team here. Some ways we use it include:

• Setting team goals/OKRs
• Sharing out product docs/PRDs
• Scheduling user research sessions
• Signing up to test beta features
• Planning feature launches
• Tracking code deploys and bugs
• Collecting and tagging product feedback
• Displaying our team org chart
• Sending internal newsletters
• Acting as a knowledge base for product teams

[Databaser]

Zach_Felsenstein:

• Displaying our team org chart

The org chart really could use some love :grimacing: The aligning is terrible when using photos. Maybe something to put on the product feedback list? :smiling_face_with_halo:

[Allen_Moldovan]

Can we get a share link to the base? :slightly_smiling_face:

[Hannah_Wiginton]

Hey Allen,

You might check out our On2Air Actions app for better documents/spreadsheets with Airtable.

You can create a template in Google Sheets, Docs, or Slides and it will automatically generate a document (PDF and/or Google file) with your data and upload it back to an Attachment field in your base.

You can do a free trial to test it out.

Function - Google Sheets Create/Export

Function - Google Sheets Create/Export

The Google Sheets Function in On2Air Actions allows you to automatically create a new Google Sheets file and PDF document using data from your Airtable record. You can generate single page and multi-page documents that display a single record or list...