I think that cognitive aspect’s real important. Applying a designer mindset to an engineering problem or being very process oriented really helps to create the best product. The best teams are able to mix and match designer and engineer processes in the best possible ways. Some of the best people to think through those problems often have an engineering mindset. The type of thinking you’d do for that is very similar to software engineering, so I think people who have this mindset-of taking these building blocks and really reducing complexity, and trying to make things simple and elegant, and thinking of different layers of abstraction-those are things that can transcend design engineering. I’ve always found that on the teams that work the best, the lines are blurred between the different disciplines.įor example, it works well when the engineering team participates in design along with the product and design teams: The best teams take the best ideas from anybody, rather than being territorial and saying, “Oh, I’m a designer, I’m the person that owns this design.” Occasionally, authorship gets in the way of people taking the best ideas from wherever they surface.Īt Airtable, a lot of our engineering team is very product-focused, so a lot of the problems we’re tackling are creating these building blocks that people can combine to create their own applications. What do you think it looks like when the design team works effectively with the product and engineering team, and where can things go wrong? Andrew: A lot of it is just about collaboration. You have a background in computer science, and then you did some product management at Google for around three years. Eli: Thanks for that high-level overview. I think people appreciate that aspect as well. We want to make it a product that is enjoyable, that people love to come back to, and is beautiful. The third thing, is we really sweat the details and put a lot of effort into design and small interactions and just making it something people will use on a daily basis. The other thing is, if you are somewhat technical, you understand what a database is on an abstract level, but Airtable’s this very visual means, so I think technical folks really appreciate how much we’ve taken this somewhat complicated concept that programmers understand and made it elegant and simple, so anybody can use it for their own means. Before, they didn’t really have the means to create their own software to do something very specific that matches their intent and the specific process they have in their head. I think one of the reasons people love it, is that it’s very empowering. Cattle ranchers will use Airtable to track their cattle.Īirtable is used for everything from organizing user research to cattle farming. We’ve always thought of it as a LEGO kit that people can use to build custom software workflows as a non-programmer, whether that be for something like a video production pipeline, organizing all your user research, or even cattle farming. What do you think it is about your product’s design that gets people to fall in love with it? Andrew: Airtable combines the ease of a spreadsheet with the power of a database. It’s pretty clear that you’ve got some user love there. Here’s one from Brandon Hall, July 26: Airtable has completely taken over every aspect of my life, my to-dos, calendar, ideas, projects, content planning.This is from Leslie Baris, July 23: Seriously in love with Airtable, it was all the things I’ve always wanted project management software to do.Let me read a few tweets here, recent ones: Obviously by your Twitter feed, your users really seem to love it. Andrew studied Electrical Engineering and Economics at Duke after a childhood in rural Montana.Įli: Andrew Ofstad, co-founder and chief product officer at Airtable, welcome to Conversations on DesignBetter.Co. Previously, he lead the redesign of Google’s flagship Maps product, and before that was a product manager for Android. Andrew Ofstad is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Airtable.
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