How an Airtable Overhaul Saved Marketing Operations at an Aerospace Software Company
TABLE OF CONTENTS
The Client
FF is a software company that support airplane pilots planning, briefing, filing, and logging flights.
They were already using Airtable to manage all marketing initiatives, from content creation to event management.
They faced significant challenges with inconsistency across teams within a department.
The Challenge
- Different teams were using various methods to manage tasks and projects, causing chaos and inefficiencies.
- Eg: each team used different fields such as "status" and "stage", or used different views with different filtering and fields shown. They were seeing different results which lead to miscommunication and inefficiencies.
- The irregularity and lack of a unified system led to confusion and wasted time. This often resulted in deadlines being missed, and meetings taking longer to align on tasks.
The Solution
- Teams were moved to Airtable Interfaces to ensure a consistent experience across the board.
- Subtasks were added to enhance task breakdown.
- A template system was put in place for new project creation, where tasks for that project are autogenerated. Tasks get marked as done automatically when a project is completed, removing them from teams' to-do lists.
- People assigned to tasks get notified, with the choice to receive instant notifications via Slack and/or email
- A form was added for ForeFlight staff to request marketing materials. Upon approval, the form submission triggers the creation of an entire project and all related tasks necessary for the event, showcasing the form's full integration with the project management system.
- Used 100% Airtable Automations and no external iPaas
- We provided ForeFlight teams with the opportunity to give verbal feedback during multiple sessions, which allowed for faster turnaround times and more iterative improvements based on the team's actual needs
The Results
- Standardized and automated system that allow for a consistent experience across interfaces creating and updating tasks
- Teams like Design can see tasks assigned to them across sections that were otherwise not visible to them
- Employees can choose preferred notifications channel
- Managers can lock edits to make sure no one is messing with bases.
- Projects completed always on time met
- Realignment meetings not needed anymore, saving 3 hours a week
The Tech Stack
- Purely Airtable, Interfaces and Automations included. No external iPaas.
