Tracking deadlines AND progress for multiple phases within many concurrent projects

[caseycaplowe]

Hi all!

I'm the product team for a company that produces physical goods (apparel and hard goods). For each new product launch we have multiple phases and deadlines we need to manage: briefing due date, design due date, sample due date, PO date, etc (14 milestones in total). We are managing across dozens of new products at all times and want a way to track our progress through these, not just to list out the phases and deadlines. 

I've built out our airtable to show the due dates for each phase against each product (see screenshot below), now we're looking for a way for our team check off when a phase is complete and have that visually indicated to us -- for instance have the cells with deadline colored to gray when complete, but also colored to green when due date is within a couple weeks and red when due date is past.

We're relatively new (and not yet super sophisticated) airtable users -- so would love whatever guidance you can provide. Thanks!

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Coloring specific cells isn't possible at this time I'm afraid.  Perhaps you could try having a new table where each record represented a single phase?  That way you'd be able to easily input data and set the status of each phase with a single column, instead of having to create one status column per phase.  With 14 milestones you'd end up with something like 24 more fields to manage

To power this I'd suggest using record templates: https://support.airtable.com/docs/using-record-templates-in-airtable

It sounds like each product launch has the same phases, and so you'd create one record template to contain all of these, and for each new product you'd just apply this template and all the records would get created for you automatically