Production Line #2: Favorite Tools of Volt Lines (Spoiler: Airtable, Notion and Zapier)

Burcu Gürel
Volt Lines
Published in
6 min readDec 28, 2018
Night-time ride photos are my things, as you can remember from our previous post around Product (Photo by Javier García).

(Türkçesi için buradan alalım.)

Hi there! It’s Burcu from Volt Lines once again. Hope you are closing/have closed the year with very cool 2019 plans that you will actually follow.

Since I believe the tools we are using every day at Volt Lines for a while are proved themselves and deserved being recommended out loud, and I hope they are not the ones that you already use daily like Slack, I concluded to honour them by explaining how they are helping us, Product Engineering team to scale and catch up with the needs both on Product and Business sides. You see, this article will be around our favorite lifesaver tools: the tools we are using daily, to manage our production process and fulfill the gaps between other tools and our API, and the pros and cons for each everyone.

Here is the list of the selected ones for you to see them briefly:

  1. Airtable — “A creative palette of app-like functionality that you can mix and match to create the perfect workflow for your team.”
  2. Notion — “Write, plan, collaborate and get organized. All you need in one tool.”
  3. Zapier — “Connect Your Apps and Automate Workflows”

Let’s deep dive for going over their key features.

1. Airtable

Hunted Airtable around 9 months ago while I was surfing on Product Hunt, searching for an alternative to Google Sheets. Our need was a flexible spreadsheet that is working as a database, and Airtable was the perfect match:

I remember this hero like the first day. It’s still a legit illustration tone indeed.

Once I got into it, I clearly saw that it’s beyond a database — it’s the new Excel. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you can do some of the things on Airtable that you are doing on Excel — it’s like the Venusaur while Excel is basically the Bulbasaur, so it’s beyond that.

With the Blocks that was free first but became their revenue model now, they have enabled people like me to manage their databases with proper and customizable UI and UX. That helped us a lot: from our initial versions of the Sales pipeline to our hiring workflow, we got its benefits by using it every day.

Quick view for some of the Blocks overall. Such calculations. Much graphs.

Pros — Airtable is perfect for engineered-minds: smart relationships among different databases, or just a location-based database for you to list your house renting candidates on a map with some parameters using Location block, charts that are built by pivots fed real-time, custom dashboards to see both a countdown and a kanban board, insanely logical-functioning formulas (check this community-powered forum to see how big they have gone about formulas), and so. Plus it has a Zapier integration, which I’ll talk about in a minute. Cons are predictable given by those: Not the first-choice tool for notes, wikis, things that are based on “words”, not numbers. Still a masterpiece for our needs around online, flexible tables that we can connect with almost anything.

Bonus:

  • Templates can make you see the common use cases of Airtable.
  • Table2Site is converting Airtable databases into actual websites. Cool indeed.

2. Notion

Fan-freaking-tasticly loving how those sketches have the same style everywhere — even their Support team’s avatars on Intercom.

My personal favorite of the year -as anyone on our office could say- is Notion from the day I hunted them on Product Hunt (kudos for Product Hunt too). The need for Notion popped up around my dissatisfaction with Atlassian products for task and wiki management since I used them and know their pain points very well when it comes to being flexible for a small team, but the necessity for something similar to them: a tool for everyone on the team that makes everything around product easily accessible and connected like sprint planning, requirements documenting/reviewing, monitoring the overall progress on sprints/features/tasks, and most importantly, a transparent process management for making everyone across the company to see what’s happening.

Pros

  • Blocks: Similar to Airtable, there are also blocks in Notion: just typing “/” is giving you a list of possible blocks to create:
A few of the Blocks triggered with a slash mark. Basically everything is openly embeddable — even a single screen on Invision or a document on Google Docs. They preferred to use the mouse on this GIF to select a block, but it’s easier with the keyboard.
  • Flexibility: It’s the most flexible, time-saving and experience-centered tool that I have ever used — heaven for a Product Manager that lives with the same passions. Building a new feature with having the initial plans, documentation, test cases, subtasks, UX flows, and UIs on the same one page is saving days for me and the team while we’re in a war with a variety of urgencies.

With Notion, we are having radically-improved Sprint Dashboards almost every sprint, linked databases with different views as Calendar, List, Table, Kanban board for a variety of needs. Everyone on the team also has the ability for creating their own dashboards by easily having anything they want to see on it, and it’s always sync with the views of others.

  • Writing: It’s even better from writing on Medium — words just flow in a clean UI. It’s the same when documenting our API structure for a new feature — they have the custom editor even for Python.

Cons are mostly because of their “coming soon” work— Not having a public API, integrations with Zapier, etc. are requested around their community for a while and are on their short-time roadmap. Their wide-spectrum of personas as customers are probably creating issues on prioritizing stuff too: mostly writers and personal users, newly engineering teams (as I observed around their community). This could be the reason for lack of views as charts, prefixed tasks, Bitbucket integrations and similars, the things that engineering/developer teams need mostly.

Waiting for the public API like I’m waiting for the new Frank Ocean album.

Bonus:

  • Check their About page to observe their vision.
  • Check this fast-growing Facebook group to see best practices around the Notion community.
  • Also, check this website for having some personal inspiration.

3. Zapier

Remember IFTTT? Zapier is in the form of that but in a more business-related way.

Zapier saved our souls many times, for many urgent needs that just came from nowhere. Basically it’s a bridge for different apps for having custom and automated workflows between each other. With a trigger like having a new job application from the website, a new rating from our users or a new sales lead, it’s enabling opportunities for sending customized emails with the related name, a calendar event for a meeting when the status of an item changed, a new record on Airtable and a ping to Slack when a new record created on a certain condition.

Pros — Possibilities are just endless with Zapier. Most of the apps we are using are capable of integrating with it, and downtimes are almost zero. Also, their support team is a champion — asked weird questions so much and they replied every time with a constant openness to communicate. Cons — A bit expensive if you want to have 20+ flows for you to work. Still “Zapier flow first, build our own next” is working perfectly in our cases.

Bonus:

  • Just check this landing to find apps that you use and see how you can connect and automatize the process that you are doing manually.

Here we are, at the end of my for-free promotional content about the tools that are saving me and the team from the devils day and night. Thank you for your high motivation for reading it to them and many thanks to the Notion, Airtable and Zapier teams for making our work easier too, can’t be more appreciated. ❤

Soon we will be publishing what we did on this year’s Q4 — stay updated by following our blog.

The Volt Lines team will be growing from 12 people to nearly 26 by the end of January 2019. Here are some of the top positions we’re hiring for: HR Manager, Finance Manager, Product Manager, Corporate Sales Managers, Operation Managers, Data Scientists, and Backend Developers. Please visit our careers page for more details.

All I wish for you is a well-wasted last night of 2018, so cheers!

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