Product launch calendar

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A big part of being a product manager is making sure that feature launches go smoothly. This launch calendar is what we use internally at Airtable to track and launch upcoming product launches.

This launch calendar takes inspiration from my time at Google, where we had an internal tool called “LaunchCal” that was used to track upcoming launches. Each launch in LaunchCal had fields listing the owners from various departments, marketing collateral, and approval bits that needed to be flipped by various higher-ups. It was a great way to keep track of all the moving parts involved in a feature launch, and we’ve adopted a similar process here at Airtable.

Like many apps in the world, the LaunchCal application was essentially just a simple view on top of a relational database — just the type of thing for which Airtable is excellently suited.

In addition to keeping everyone on the same page for our launch plans, we found it unexpectedly useful to keep different people on different pages. For the marketing team, the actual public feature release date matters most, because that’s when all marketing collateral needs to be ready. For engineering, on the other hand, the feature deployment date is more important, and occurs before the public launch date (we do this through rigorous use of feature flags).

Unlike traditional calendar apps, which have a hardcoded “schema” for calendar events (and a single, hardcoded date field), Airtable users can create as many date fields as they’d like for their records. In the case of our “Feature Launches” database, we’ve created separate fields to track the “launch date” and the “deploy date” of any given feature. Luckily, we designed our views in a similarly flexible way. So for any particular table, you can create as many different calendar views as you’d like, and each one can refer to any date field in the table.

As such, we have separate “launch” and “deploy” calendar views using their respective date fields, but any details added to a feature item from either view are synced across all views.

We put a lot of time into making this product launch calendar fit the idiosyncrasies of our team and process. But that doesn't mean it's perfect for you. The beauty of Airtable is that you can tweak it to work just right for you and your team.

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Updated March 22, 2017 at 5:06 PM
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Andrew Ofstad

Airtable Co-Founder. Product, design, and a bit of code. Former Google Maps PM.
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