NoCode to the rescue

This short post is about how NoCode has made freed up one of my product squad’s workflow.

Situation: Somehow during the pandemic and in of my product squads I managed to mix up where their ideas, fixes and improvements were getting stored. We started telling each other everything on the twice-monthly calls and I was just noting them in a OneNote doc, “for later”.

Now even though we’re a JIRA house for most of our work, there isn’t a simple project in JIRA for the squad to just add in ideas themselves. JIRA is managed in Keypath centrally and is mostly considered for the LD teams, and not the product squads.

During the last year, OneNote seemed a good space for me to capture everything on these calls. It can manage pictures, drawings, notes and files, and all pretty swiftly. It gave us no concerns for a while.

However, a debt was building. The whole team’s work went through me (so they lost ownership), into a non-databasey system (so it’s difficult to interegate) and it was difficult to get a high-level picture and keep track of our work in progress… it was like my shed, it’s all in there… just not sure where.

The push for change happened when my preparation for meetings was taking longer than the meeting, I couldn’t re-order items and I couldn’t see the fields I needed to work coherently.

The solution came from the energy I was putting into researching NoCode solutions, and specifically AirTable (referral link).

By creating a simple Base, I was able to quickly create a table for issues, quickly create a form to capture the issues from all members, and quickly create a select dropdown to categorise issues.

This has resulted in me saving easily an hour every week re-ordering the items, the team re-gaining ownership of reporting their issues, the senior ID having transparency on the backlog, and for me it was less of a worry / cognitive effort to untangle our backlog.

The other benefits are, we can re-make workflows to how we need rather than going through JIRA and the central team. We can run and adjust our workflow as we need.

By using AirTable for our tiny ticket system, it has freed the team up.