Make Grid: The journey continues

In November, we unveiled a new and exciting solution which we believe is both a fitting evolution of the Make platform and a game-changing innovation to revolutionize how our customers use our tools. Make Grid is an interactive, automatically generated map of your automation solutions that shows you exactly how all your applications connect and how data flows across them. This visual grid of your no-code landscape will allow you and your teams to keep building fast and with confidence. We’ve been working hard in the background on Make Grid for over 18 months already. Attendees at our annual event Waves got to see it first last month. It’s been an exciting few weeks seeing our first customers come onboard and share both their enthusiasm and feedback.

We wanted to lift the lid on Make Grid a little more to give you a further update on what it is and why we believe it has such huge potential for our customers. To help with this, we’re going to focus on how Make Grid can help you make a change in a system without breaking anything - sometimes referred to as build-time governance. 

Build with greater confidence

Have you ever felt anxious about making changes to a scenario, worrying that you might break something? It’s a common experience. Perhaps you’re tweaking or even removing an Airtable field or modifying a webhook response - and of course you don’t want to disrupt everything that depends on it. The anxiety is real and the effort to optimize and improve solutions without disruption and errors can become tedious and inefficient. 

Our first customers were very excited to discover that we could solve the particular Airtable challenge outlined above - so we’ll use this example to illustrate how Make Grid helps in such situations. 

Let’s imagine you’re planning to make a major change on an Airtable table, removing some fields and adjusting others, and you need to understand which scenarios are impacted. With Make Grid, starting from one of the related scenarios, you can simply zoom out and see the assets the scenario interacts with - among them the Airtable table. Even if you’re not starting from a scenario, the search functionality will help you find the table easily.

You can now see which scenarios interact with the table, and even if they read from or write to it. Thus, you immediately know which scenarios might be impacted by the change you have in mind. You can also open the table to check further details. All of this is automatically generated, and always up to date - so you don’t have to worry about missing a dependency.

What’s even better though? You can actually find the list of fields that are used by any of these scenarios. This helps you quickly identify if fields are used at all, and if so, by which scenarios. 

Watch this simple video tutorial to learn more.

Gradual rollout underway

Beta onboarding for Make Grid is well underway and we’re extremely grateful for the enthusiasm and excitement around our new solution. To ensure a seamless experience, we’re rolling out access in phases through a waitlist system. We already offer a good experience and can support the most relevant apps being used. We’re working hard to expand app coverage and will be continuously expanding availability as we move forward with the Beta test.

Get involved

Exciting times lie ahead. We’ll continue to keep you updated through our website and blog.

You can also sign up to join the beta waitlist to be among the first to access Make Grid. 

While we can’t guarantee that everyone who signs up will be selected, we appreciate your enthusiasm and willingness to partner in the continued evolution of Make.