[rohanprabhu]

Back at my previous company, which was a travel startup, there was a list of curated vacation packages that were created for every weekend. So, the itineraries team used to spend 5 days designing the packages and getting vendors on board, and then they used to fill up a google sheet with the details in it and the devs used to run a script, which used to populate this rows in the database and make any other updates required and it used to show up on the website. The reasons why this worked so well for us:

1. There were at the most 30-40 rows. Google Spreadsheets works amazing for small table sizes (although not as small as 30-40, I'd assume upto 1500-5000 should be fine as well).

2. All non-dev teams were EXTREMELY comfortable with Google Spreadsheets. For people with non-engineering backgrounds, a spreadsheet is an amazing, low-barrier entry to structured data which I believe is what made this solution amazing.

3. The dev team was completely removed as a dependency, and we had staging environments where they would run it first to ensure it was working properly, so a dev could be engaged only if their spreadsheet run wasn't working as expected or due to some other issue. The previous method was a huge email sent out to the devs, who would handcraft it into a JSON, which would then be passed to a script and then written to the database. This required every run to be effectively final.. there were only so many times one could engage a dev.

4. While we had to engage a dev to execute the script, it actually is very easy to integrate a menu option within the google sheets interface itself (if you are using Google Apps) for your domain, which would say something like 'Deploy to Staging', although we never got around to actually building this.

For startups where product turnaround time is required to be short, this works as an amazing solution as it makes so easy for non-tech guys to input data into the system. While there is no doubt that a fully developed panel for these operations would be the best solution, one doesn't always have the luxury of time.