Anatomy of a product workflow

Based on the tried-and-true best practices of leading companies, our step-by-step implementation guide gives you everything you need to build exceptional product operations.

No matter your team’s size, needs, or workflow requirements, Airtable is flexible enough to meet them. As a starting point, below are some common ways that product operations teams organize their work, and how to streamline these workflows in Airtable.

A typical product workflow can be broken down into three key levels:

In the diagram below, you can see how these levels are typically organized:

While this framework may help get you started, don’t forget that Airtable is meant to adapt to your product workflows—not the other way around. Most importantly, make sure your team is on the same page and aligned around the same terminology and workflow.

Two templates for product operations in Airtable

To execute your product operations successfully, it’s crucial to keep your team on track and align on your roadmap as an organization. Throughout these guides, you’ll see references to two different Airtable bases to meet those needs: a team-level base and an org-level base.

These templates are designed to leverage syncing, a common tool teams use to drive organization-wide alignment in Airtable. Syncing allows you to connect individual bases together, sharing information back and forth between them.

This way, your team (and others) can focus on your day-to-day work, while syncing your key projects into a high-level roadmap for your entire organization.

Connecting the templates?

When you’re building and working in Airtable, connectivity is key. On top of being able to sync individual bases together, you can use linked records to create connections between tables inside a given base.

Both sync and linked records help you streamline information and avoid misalignment. Let’s take a look at how these templates use linked records and sync to build powerful connections for any product operations workflow.

Team-level base

The team-level base holds 6 tables: Projects, OKRs, Customer feedback, Launch assets, Sprints, and Sprint tasks. You can see how these tables are linked together in the diagram below:

Over the course of these guides, we’ll walk you through how to dive into this template and start using all 6 tables. Use the list below to jump to a particular section, or just start from the beginning.

Org-level base

The org-level base holds 7 tables: Projects, OKRs, Customer feedback, Team members, Customer accounts, Assets/Materials, and Project milestones. You can see how these tables are linked together in the diagram below:

Over the course of these guides, we’ll walk you through how to dive into this template and start using all 7 tables. Use the list below to jump to a particular section, or just start from the beginning.

Syncing between the team-level base and the org-level base

As mentioned above, the team-level and org-level templates are designed to be connected via Airtable sync. In the diagram below, you can see how the Projects and OKRs tables in each base are connected:

To learn more about using sync with these templates, explore this guide—or just start from the beginning.