Step 6.1: Start measuring and reporting results
Airtable
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Airtable
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Guide for product operations
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Start measuring and reporting results
One of the best ways to leverage key insights, especially in real-time and on an ongoing basis, is to proactively mitigate risks for a given feature launch. If you’ve been following along with Stages 1 through 5, you’ve already unlocked opportunities to do this throughout your launch process.
Throughout these guides, you’ve captured ongoing insights at different stages of the product operations lifecycle, and below, we’ll summarize and call back to many of them.
Follow along in Airtable.
This step features the team-wide and org-wide example bases.
Learn more and download these templates here.
Aggregate insights across the product lifecycle
Because you’ve used Airtable to bring together every stage of the product lifecycle into a single source of truth, you don’t need to do much extra work to see insights across your entire workflow.
A great tool for aggregating insights from every part of your base is Interface Designer. You can use the chart, number, and other interface elements to create real-time dashboards that are customized for the needs of various stakeholders.
Here are some of the insights you’ve already been collecting along the product ops process, and how you might bring them into your dashboard:
Understand OKR progress (Stage 2): See the progress of OKR completion throughout the quarter to take proactive action if OKRs appear to be slipping. A chart element can help you quickly visualize progress, and number elements can provide more specific stats to dig into.
Mitigate launch risks and date slippages (from Stage 5): When tracking work on each feature, one way you can prevent slippages is to track a bill of material completion. For a given feature, use a chart or gallery element to easily see a summary of launch assets or materials that are either completed or at-risk. The sooner you see issues, the faster you can resolve them. 👍
Embrace continuous learning with retrospectives (from Stage 5): Add a “Retrospectives” field to your “Sprints” table or create a new “Retrospectives” table to track learnings for each sprint. This ensures that feedback is captured and easily searchable, which also facilitates continuous learning. It also allows you to summarize those insights in your interfaces—try adding charts or using a record review layout for this kind of input.
Manage overall product ops health by comparing planned to actual results
In order to measure and continually improve your overall product ops health, it’s important to understand the difference between your planned vs. actual results after a launch.
Here are a few ways we recommend you calculate metrics on performance using formulas and rollups so you can understand execution accuracy, helping with future-looking estimating and resource allocation:
Launch dates: Track planned vs. actual dates as it relates to different product stages, such as betas, design reviews, launch reviews, and release dates. This makes it easy to see the difference between estimated vs. actuals, and enables better ongoing planning for future sprints.
OKR goals: Track the progress of planned OKR goals vs. what you actually delivered each quarter. View the overall status of each OKR across your entire organization, then drill down into the team-level status of key results and initiatives tied to those objectives.
Execution accuracy: Measure the number of P0, P1, etc initiatives that were delivered each quarter relative to your plans. Quickly grasp where you may have missed the mark in delivering high-priority projects and optimize for future resource planning or other blockers that may have caused any slippages.
⚡ Pro tip
Tracking launch dates helps you measure important metrics, such as execution accuracy (i.e. “what % of tier 0/1/etc. features did we actually ship, that we committed for a given timeframe?”) and the cycle time between product stages (i.e. “across all feature work for a given timeframe, how much time did we spend in each product stage?”). These metrics provide insight into product operational health, making it easy to pinpoint areas for improvement.
With all your insights in one place, you’re well-positioned to start fielding questions from your leadership team and other stakeholders. In the next step, we’ll share some tips on finding the answers to common questions around business impact.
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.
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Guide for product operations
