Design Exercise Response by Kenneth Buan Pineda
Airtable + Zapier architecture, failure-mode driven design.
These are the questions I would genuinely ask before writing a single automation. Each one changes the design. Click any question to see why it matters.
Decides where the automation triggers. If yes, the trigger must live on the Offers table, not the client record. Getting this wrong means the second offer never fires or fires wrong.
A person clicking a dropdown can misclick and flip it back 30 seconds later. If human-driven, I add a short delay buffer before the send fires.
Is there a Partners table linked to the offer? Some partners have multiple contacts who all need the notification.
A fixed list that is the same for every client means simple checkboxes. A list that varies per offer type means a separate Requirements table.
If one by one, does the partner get one email per document (annoying) or one batch email when complete? I default to batch.
If they sit in a general notes field, internal team comments will eventually be emailed to an external partner by accident. I require a dedicated shareable field.
Email caps out around 20 to 25MB. Large scanned bank statements need a secure link fallback.
A monitored shared inbox vs no-reply decides whether partner replies and bounces are ever seen by a human.
Offers with amounts and terms plus supporting documents sound financial. That changes whether attachments are even appropriate (see Recommendation 1).
Step 1 invites the partner to call the client. Do we track whether they did? Is there a follow-up if 5 days pass silently?
10 accepted offers per month vs 500 changes the tooling, the error-handling depth, and whether bounce webhooks are worth building.
Three triggered sequences. Airtable validates and flips internal flags; Zapier owns every outbound email and writes a timestamp back only after a confirmed send. Colour legend: trigger · human checkpoint · Zapier · write-back.
Four linked tables. Checkboxes drive the automations, timestamps make every send idempotent, and a dedicated Shareable Clarifications field keeps internal notes from ever reaching a partner. Click any table name to collapse it.
Each tool does what it is best at: Airtable owns the data and the gatekeeping logic; Zapier owns everything that talks to the outside world and can fail.
The section that matters most. Nine ways this design can break, and how each one is prevented or surfaced.
Both keep effort roughly the same while removing real risk — the kind of thing worth flagging early rather than discovering in production.
Send a secure expiring link to a per-offer shared folder instead. Same automation effort, better security posture, and the attachment size problem disappears entirely.
If partners insist on attachments, fine, but that should be a conscious decision, not a default.
Either send a parallel client email in Step 1 ("you may hear from [Partner], they can help with your documents") or hold the call invitation until Step 2.
The parallel email is one extra Zap step and keeps the client experience clean.