How the Platform Engineering Group Serves Airtable’s Customers

An introduction to the Platform Engineering group and how we support Airtable’s mission to democratize software creation.

Think of the last time you planned a vacation. You likely put together a list of attractions, flights, and hotels. Perhaps you played around with budgets for each until you found the right balance between experience and expense. Depending on how organized you like to be, you perhaps kept these plans in your head, took a few notes on paper, or used an app to track all of this.

Now think of running this as a travel agent business: you’d need to build plans for various locations several times over, accommodate a range of customer preferences, interface with several vendors, and respond to seasonal fluctuations. As your business scales, you’d hire a team, distribute responsibilities, and find tools to make collaboration within your team and communicating with your customers easier. If you have some software development experience, you might try to build something yourself — automating pieces of this process with some code, plugging into different streams of data, and allowing for customization when you can’t predict what your customers would want.

But, what if you don’t have the technical expertise necessary to build a system that is both cost effective and provides a differentiated and delightful experience to your customers? One option is to hire some contractors to build out this system once, but you’d have to educate them on the nuances of a travel business and make sure the system captures your business’s unique needs. Another option is to purchase some off-the-shelf software that you can configure without code, but you’d be limited to the existing configurations and you’d have to find ways to map them to your travel agent business.

This is the problem of Build vs Buy. Or, in other terms, Rock vs Hard Place. What if you could instead build a system that works for you and your team with intuitive tools that can meet your technical expertise where it’s at? That’s the promise of low-code tools.

The Airtable Approach

Here at Airtable, we have worked with a wide range of customers facing this type of challenge: from media production houses, to product development teams, to grassroots efforts for real-time COVID tracking. The modern knowledge workspace has evolved into a dense network of interconnected teams and technical systems. Teams need structured collaboration (aka a “process”) to manage the complexity of the modern workplace, and these processes often revolve around critical organizational data. Yet that data is locked away, siloed in each team’s technical stack and bespoke workflows. Collaboration is difficult and error-prone.

We are building Airtable to solve these exact problems. Underlying our product is a flexible relational database. This lets people build sophisticated connections to other systems of record, like SaaS tools and internal databases, making it possible to manage and build on that data in a structured way. This same flexibility lets them create and manage collaborative processes at scale, powered off the same canonical data sets, to ensure everyone at an organization is working in concert.

For your travel agent business, using Airtable would mean that you have all the relevant data to power your daily activities in one place. More critically, you’ll be able to build your business processes and logic on top of this data, update and customize it with ease in line with the technical skills that you have at your disposal.

Mission of the Platform Group

At Airtable, we are constantly pushing to expand the power and capabilities of our product. The Platform Group’s mission is to make Airtable customizable to the needs of all enterprises, no matter their size or industry. We have organized ourselves into four teams to build out functionality that each address a problem space, and also come together to make for a Platform where the sum is greater than the parts.

Airtable’s Connectivity tools help customers build useful connections between their most critical data sources and processes. These products allow customers to connect with the data sources that they need and across teams that they work with, breaking down data silos and instead building reliable and curated sources of truth. Once the data is in Airtable, Airtable’s Low-Code Creation tools let creators define systems that put work into the right people’s hands, in the right format, at the right time. We want to empower creators to focus on the work they do best by automating time-consuming processes that were previously manual. In addition, we want to make sure these tools, ranging from intuitive workflow builders to low-code formulas and scripts, are accessible to creators of varying levels of technical know-how. These products not only empower collaborators to seamlessly participate in processes, but also allow them to leverage the connected data and workflows in ways that weren’t possible before.

While Airtable is a horizontal platform, we also know we can’t anticipate everything that our users will want to do with Airtable. Airtable’s Developer Platform lets people write code to extend what is fundamentally possible in Airtable. And our ecosystem of tools built by experts in the community empower users to derive far more value from Airtable beyond what we provide out-of-the-box. Our goal is to provide the level of abstractions so that developer-built extensions fit seamlessly into the Airtable user experience, and support a powerful and delightful development experience so that developers can make Airtable the central tech stack of their business.

Given the complexity of the problems that the above products seek to solve, it’s vital to ensure that they are built on solid technical foundations. Our Product Infrastructure team builds the product foundations that allow for rapid development of products across Airtable Engineering with a consistent user experience, and scalable and reliable architecture. The focus here is to solve those customer problems that require product thinking, combined with the backend skills to build out the necessary heavy-duty infrastructure.

Realizing the Vision

All this makes for a variety of engineering challenges that require frontend, backend and fullstack engineering expertise, a good dose of humility, and a desire to make an impact. We work closely with our colleagues in Design and Product Management to build this modular Platform in collaboration with other groups in Engineering.

If you found this interesting, we’d love to tell you more about what we’re up to and how you can be a part of this! Do reach out by clicking here.