Hi everyone! This post has, as they say, “blown up!”
Though I’m new to the community and some of the tone here is a little surprising, I’d certainly prefer a passionate community to an apathetic one. So please do keep the feedback coming. Posts are autoflagged for certain words and personal jabs, not for criticism of ideas. I promise I can take it!
On the frustrations expressed in this thread: I hear you. The team has been absolutely flat-out on improving, expanding, and, crucially, productionizing the product and platform. As someone just jumping in from the outside, I can’t stress enough how impressed I am with how much powerful, difficult work such a small number of individuals has been able to put out.
I think it’s clear though that the size and structure of our organization hasn’t yet caught up to the promise and potential of the product itself. A good problem to have - but a problem nonetheless.
The good news, perhaps: from my perspective, it’s clear we’re kicking into a different gear. The team is growing quickly, there’s a ton of internal energy, we’re building out a product organization, and we’re focusing. I hope you’ll start to see a shift. I expect you’ll keep me honest if you don’t.
From reading through this community forum and interviews with users as I’ve been ramping up, there are definitely some low-hanging fruit. But there’s also an immense breadth of potential features to work on, all of which are crucial to a subset of users. That is to me the challenge and beauty of Airtable - it’s so immensely flexible, the potential feature surface area is nearly infinite.
So my team’s focus in particular will be to make sure that these “invisible walls” of Airtable itself don’t hold back your ability as a user to set up exactly the workflow you want, or build any customization you want. With our limited resources, and in parallel with teams working to expand the features built into Airtable, we’ve been focusing in no small way on creating the platform capabilities for anyone to extend Airtable itself.
There are huge long-term/short-term tradeoffs to make here, and I’m sure we’ll make some mistakes in prioritization, which is certainly where we can use all of your help. I’m confident that the end-result will be far more empowering.
And finally, please rest assured that this specific block is not what I’ve been working on :slightly_smiling_face: . This was actually finished a few months ago as part of a project to get more open-source block examples out there, but never made it out to beta - I just took a couple minutes to post it. I promise we’re working on some bigger things!
Looking forward to staying in touch -
Taylor
