Organize Your Product Team using Airtable
A secret to successful product team collaboration is being organized, especially when teams are working remotely. Theresa Charleston and her team use Airtable to track product discovery tasks, workload, and even do design retrospectives.
“[With Airtable], you get the communication, but you also get a really good way of documenting your action items”
Transcript
Jim Morris:
Hi there, fellow product leaders. A secret to successful product team collaboration is being organized, especially when teams are working remotely. Theresa Charleston and her team use Airtable to track product discovery tasks, workload, and even do design retrospectives. Note that neither of us is affiliated with Airtable. Enjoy.
Theresa Charleston:
We also use Airtable, which has been extremely helpful for us. I cannot recommend Airtable enough.
Jim Morris:
What do you store on Airtable? I've heard Airtable from multiple people.
Theresa Charleston:
All of the above. So, we use Airtable to outline our tasks, so things that we're doing daily, weekly, monthly. We put in the resource being used for those tasks, so it might be Theresa, it might be Michael, it might be David. But that way, you can also understand the load that's currently on that particular resource, and it helps you balance and manage how much one person is doing, and how much your team is doing wholly.
We also put documentation in there. So, we'll do retrospectives, where each person will write in what they think went well, what they think didn't go well, what are some action items, so we'll put retrospectives in Airtable and communicate via ... That's a really good check-in too, so that's part of communication, having retros each week or every two weeks is kind of two birds with one bread, so to speak. You get the communication, but you also get a really good way of documenting your action items.
We'll put all kinds of things in there. We'll put user lists, recruitment lists, we'll put the results of our user tests, some of our data, qualitative and quantitative. So, I mean, you can really use Airtable for anything that you need. We typically do not put design files in there, because it's not really what it was meant for, it's not really a server in that way. We'll use Google Drive for our design files.
Jim Morris:
Thanks for watching. You can find more product discovery resources at productdiscoverygroup.com.
Resources:
Jim Morris, Product Discovery Group
Jim coaches Product teams to collaborate with each other and seek customer input early and often during the design and ideation phase.
