Oops! Editable shared view update

[Jordan_Scott1]

Hi all -

I hope your week is going well. As you may have noticed this morning, editable shared views was accidentally enabled for all Airtable users and has since been rolled back.

First, I would like to apologize for any inconvenience or confusion this may have caused and acknowledge that we know this is a feature that the community is excited about. It has been great to watch people become experts in 30 minutes to share with the community and see all the excitement on Twitter. We know how upsetting it may be that this was accidentally enabled and we want to share some insights into what happened with all of you.

We know that collaboration in Airtable is top of mind for many of you (us too!), and the editable shared view feature is one of the many ways we’ve explored making that experience more impactful. However, we’re not currently prioritizing the development of this feature and are instead focusing on solving this problem in a more comprehensive way.

As Peter mentioned during Table Talk last month, we are planning to do a holistic revamp of permissions and updates to sharing in Airtable and do believe that there’s work to do to make collaboration in Airtable easier, more secure, and more scalable. We want to ensure we are delivering the best possible solution to you to solve this problem and have a team actively working on solutions that we hope to be able to share later this year.

We also recognize that many of you have ideas about changes you’d like to make to Airtable’s collaboration experience. We’d love to hear those ideas in the thread and why they’d be impactful for you. We’ll be taking that feedback, along with everything you’ve shared related to this problem in the Community in the past to help guide our future thinking.

Thank you for your understanding, we really appreciate it and apologize again for any confusion.

[Jordan_Scott1]

@Ben.Young I totally understand and I am terribly sorry about any swirl this created for you today. While I’m glad to know this was able to get your users excited, I am equally sad it ended with disappointment.

Launch communication is something that is incredibly top of mind for us and I hope that you’ll start to see improvements soon once we can get all the appropriate stakeholders aligned.

Appreciate your perspective here!

[Jeremy_Oglesby]

Here you go, @Kamille_Parks

https://media.giphy.com/media/ly8G39g1ujpNm/giphy.gif(image larger than 4 MB)

[caffeinatedwes]

Thank you for the update, @Jordan_Scott1.

I realize this wasn’t your mistake and regardless of who it was, we’ve all been there.

That doesn’t stop this from being a huge bummer. After I saw this, I let the Airtable communities I’m a part of know and was really excited for its potential. There were even a few potential clients that I was going to inform about this, as it would make their projects so much more feasible with this functionality. Luckily, I heard this was a mistake before I was able to let them know and it saved me a bit of face and difficult conversations with these potential clients, but I empathize with the responses above of those who haven’t been as fortunate.

I look forward to better collaboration functionality in the future. And for what it’s worth, Airtable still has my until then.

[Grow_With_Jen]

@Jordan_Scott1 I’m sure you are getting multiple versions of “can you tell us first before you roll it out”?

I’ve said this in multiple settings as well. But I think either a widely distributed or consultant distributed roadmap of upcoming features at least 1 day (but really week) ahead would also solve some of this pandemonium for Airtable as well.

If we are constantly looking for new easter eggs, get surprised by clients uncovering some new feature, or just otherwise needing to stop our regularly scheduled day to become experts with no instructions, then this type of situation will happen.

We rush to be the first person to tell our clients so we look like we are the experts that we are, or feel the weight of the influx of support tickets with no understanding of what is actually going on.

I can tell you stories of a software company that would routinely release major updates the day before US holidays - they were a US based company. It created a ton of work and insecurity of users over long weekends and was just unnecessary drama.

Getting ahead of tweaks (both big and small) and knowing all the fabulousness that is in store, even just 24 hours in advance would let us all relax, a teensy, tiny bit.

[Julian_E_Post]

I agree, as others have suggested, that we need a better alert system for updates. But you made the decision to alert your customers 30min after something changed on your Airtable dashboard, without knowing anything else about it! Please keep the comments respectful! We’re all human. I can tell that Jordan is trying really hard to fix this as much as she can.

[Ron_Manke]

Thanks for the honesty…

It’s obvious that this is a much needed feature, so I look forward to seeing a version of this in the near future.

[Databaser]

Yes, I’m to blame here for being enthusiastic and proactive towards my clients for a feature they are longing for :upside_down_face:

[kuovonne]

Julian_E_Post:

But you made the decision to alert your customers 30min after something changed on your Airtable dashboard, without knowing anything else about it!

I’m sure that we will all be more cautious about informing customers about new features from now on.

However, it is quite possible that he had far more than 30 minutes experience with this feature. It has been in enterprise beta for a while, and it isn’t that complex a feature to figure out. The feature was also active for more than 30 minutes this morning, and multiple consultants had verification from others that this feature was widely available. Given Airtable’s history of how it rolls out feature changes, thinking that this was a new public feature was a reasonable assumption.

[Kamille_Parks]

For the benefit of those who work at Airtable who may not be familiar, there are at least two major regular live webcasts whose sole purpose is to discuss Airtable-related news: BuiltOnAir (Tuesdays) and Off The Record (Wednesdays).

Naturally, since we saw this change in several non-Enterprise accounts this morning, we discussed our first impressions on today’s episode, which was broadcasted live prior to the retraction. Part of what we do every episode is to test/clarify new features as they arrive so that consultants and lay-people stay up to date.

Of course accidents happen, but if there were a day to push updates that may accidently release a game changer such as this, I would recommend it be Thursday just based on that alone.

[Databaser]

I had like a minimum of 2 hours on this. Even the always great GAP Consulting did a 14’ tutorial on the topic! This, in combo with the BuiltOnAir session, the many confirmative messages on LinkedIn, Twitter and the BuiltOnAir community, and we are labelled idiots for wanting to share this asap with our customers… :man_facepalming: