Scott White from AirTable discusses the importance of transparency in product operations and how great ideas can come from anywhere in an organization. They talk about the evolution of product operations, empowering teams through data, balancing autonomy and alignment, and the significance of customer feedback in product management.
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question_answer ANECDOTE
From Generalist To Product Founder
Scott describes his path from generalist roles at Dropbox to founding a low-code DevOps startup and being acquired by Airtable.
He ties that journey to focusing on democratizing no-code, low-code tools inside Airtable's product vertical.
insights INSIGHT
Airtable As An Orchestration Layer
Airtable acts as a flexible orchestration layer that pulls data from tools like Jira and Zendesk into a single source of truth.
This lets teams visualize and abstract engineering-level status at a higher level for cross-functional decision making.
volunteer_activism ADVICE
Automate Voice-Of-Customer Collection
Centralize customer feedback from sources like Zendesk and Gong to create a voice-of-customer repository.
Automate routing and tagging so stakeholders can form hypotheses and convert feedback into roadmap items quickly.
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Melissa Perri welcomes Scott White to this week’s episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Scott leads the product vertical at AirTable, so he shares how his own organization puts into place the tools and processes AirTable supports. Melissa and Scott discuss the many benefits of product operations and how it evolves as a company grows, “global alignment with local autonomy,” Melissa’s dream product ops set up, automated roadmap review, and product management in platform companies.
Here are some key points you’ll hear Scott and Melissa talk about:
Scott talks about his introduction to the product management field, his professional background, and what led him to AirTable. [2:02]
Scott shares why he entered the product management sphere, how his product works, and the versatility of AirTable. [4:25]
AirTable’s product development process and how product operations are conducted.
Product development should be a company-wide concern and not solely the product team’s. “Great ideas can come from anywhere within an organization as long as people have the visibility and the context into why the organization is prioritizing what that they are,” Scott says. [14:44]
The evolution of product operations and when it is most essential to organizations of varying sizes. Scott says that there are two major points where your product operations should metamorphose: “One is when you need to improve your product desperately ….. Number two is when you're drastically increasing the complexity of your business.” [17:39]
Scott shares how his product operations team sets goals, monitors strategy, and tracks the goals and metrics, to ensure that they're tackling the task at hand so that they can achieve their goals. [21:07]
Scott reveals what he believes to be the most crucial practice that a product leader can implement when conducting product operations. “I think ultimately [as a product leader] it’s critical to understand the voice of your customers when you're building products.” [37:00]
Melissa asks Scott about his transition from CEO to product leader and what aspects of his former role he carries into his new one. [38:58]
Resources
Scott White | LinkedIn | Twitter
Product Thinking