Airtable: London 2025
Graham speaks at Airtable: London 2025 about what he has built using the Airtable platform.
Airtable: London 2025 was a highly informative, collaborative and well-organised event where I ( Graham Reed ) was honoured to be asked to speak about what I have been building for the past year at HeliosX, with Airtable central to many of the Product Ops initiatives, going heavy on the details for those interested in the HOW!
Here is what ‘an AI’ made of it 😆
2 Key Implementations
1. Product Management & Sprint Tracking
The initial focus was reorganising how the product management team visualised roadmaps and tracked development.
Granular Visibility: The system tracks data down to the hour, including team capacity, individual squad performance, and historical success rates (planned vs. delivered).
Resource Management: We can account for engineers being on holiday or routed to support desks, allowing for highly accurate planning based on actual availability.
The Outcome: This solved a “trust gap” between leadership and teams. Leadership didn’t lack faith in the staff, but rather lacked visibility. The new dashboards allow executives to see velocity and ask informed questions before work begins.
2. Enterprise-Wide OKR System
Following the success in Product Management, we are currently rolling out a custom-built OKR (Objectives and Key Results) system for the entire business.
Hierarchical Structure: The system links top-level company goals down through multiple layers (Key Results → Initiatives → Tasks).
Line of Sight: Any staff member can drill down or up to see how a specific task relates to a high-level corporate goal.
Change Management: We initially “over-engineered” this system (including meeting notes and action items). We strategically hid these advanced features for the initial rollout to avoid overwhelming staff, emphasising the importance of matching tool complexity with user readiness.
Future Outlook: AI & Automation
HeliosX is now moving into advanced automation and AI integration within their Airtable environment.
Competitor Intelligence: We are building an AI agent that searches for news on competitors and the online pharmacy market, summarizes it, and posts it to Slack for leadership daily.
Predictive Analytics: We plan to use AI to extrapolate progress data, predicting where projects will go off-track and identifying when new hiring or capacity shifts are required before problems occur.
Centralised Staffing: A new centralized staff management system will serve as a reference point for all other databases.
Strategic Takeaways
Visibility Builds Trust: Providing leadership with accessible data and pretty charts created a “happy CEO” and fostered better dialogue between stakeholders and engineering teams.
ProductOps Philosophy: Successful implementation isn’t just about building the tool; it is about change management. Rolling out features gradually ensures higher adoption rates than releasing a complex system all at once.