Anatomy of a product workflow
Airtable
6 min read
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Airtable
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Guide for product operations
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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:
Objectives and key results: The goals for your product, team, and organization at the highest level. Your team might use OKRs or another objective-setting framework.
Features, projects, or epics: Your team’s main units of work. While your team might break these up into smaller tasks, your roadmap will generally focus on this level.
User stories or sprint tasks: The smallest units of work for your team. These are often assigned to a single owner, and might be completed in sprints.
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.
Team-wide base
The foundation of your team’s product operations. Track objectives, roadmap, and customer feedback all in one place.
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Org-level base
Ready to align your roadmap across your entire organization? Centralize objectives and projects from multiple team-level bases.
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Team-wide base
The foundation of your team’s product operations. Track objectives, roadmap, and customer feedback all in one place.
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Org-level base
Ready to align your roadmap across your entire organization? Centralize objectives and projects from multiple team-level bases.
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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.
For more on how these two templates are connected together, read on to the next section.
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.
First, collect customer feedback in the Customer feedback table
Next, set and track objectives in the OKRs table
Organize essential details for any product feature in the Project table
Understand how you can orchestrate work across your Projects, Sprints, and Sprints tasks tables
Learn how to manage Launch assets and Projects together across these two tables
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.
Start centralizing feedback across your sources and teams in the Customer feedback table
Next, manage objectives across multiple teams in Airtable in the OKRs table
Learn how to build an organization-wide roadmap using the Projects table
Orchestrate work across Team members, Project milestones, and Assets/Materials
Explore best practices for scaling launch management across the organization across in the Projects table
Report results for your organization across the OKR table and Project table
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.
About the author
Airtableis the digital operations platform that empowers people closest to the work to accelerate their most critical business processes. Across every industry, leading enterprises trust Airtable to power workflows in product operations, marketing operations, and more – all with the power of AI built-in. More than 500,000 organizations, including 60% of the Global 2000, rely on Airtable for digital operations and citizen development to help transform how work gets done.
Filed Under
Guide for product operations
