Step 6.1: Start measuring and reporting results

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.

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.