Driving Growth With Productive: How Numble Scaled Smarter

I’m one of the co-founders of Numble, a project-based agency we started five years ago within the larger Cronos Group, which is an ecosystem of over 600 IT companies and around 9,500 people today. I originally joined Cronos as a full-stack developer right after my studies, but I quickly transitioned into project and account management roles before founding Numble with two others.

At Numble, we operate in the digital and IT space, primarily serving clients who require complex, project-based work. Our approach has always been a bit atypical compared to other Cronos companies, many of which focus on consultancy. Because of this, budgeting and project planning have always been absolutely essential to how we work.

We’ve grown from three to 35 people over the last five years, and I currently handle many of the company’s sales responsibilities, in addition to helping optimize our internal operations.

There was never really a “before” Productive for us—we implemented it on day one. Even back in 2019, we already knew that relying on Excel files and outdated workflows wouldn’t be a fit for the way we wanted to run our company. We needed a modern, flexible solution that could grow with us.

Although I had experience implementing tools like Harvest, Forecast, and Tempo in the past, I found that Productive had a lot more to offer, especially when it came to planning and budget management. That made it a clear choice from the start.

The benefits were clear from the very beginning. In the early days of the agency, when we were a small team, I handled everything—sales, project management, and budget tracking. Productive gave us structure and insights into all our workflows, from project planning to financial oversight.

As we grew, Productive scaled with us. Today, our project managers own their budgets inside the platform, and we use Productive very differently than we did a few years ago. But what hasn’t changed is the value it brings to our day-to-day operations.

Honestly, I can’t imagine going back to Excel-based processes. If we didn’t have Productive today, I don’t know what we’d do; it’s essential to how we work.

One of the most impactful things we’ve done is build a synchronization between Productive and Cronos’s internal systems. That allowed us to connect time tracking data for invoicing purposes and push leave requests from our HR system into Productive. The result is a much more streamlined internal workflow, where everything syncs automatically and we avoid repetitive manual work.

However, beyond our own company, this integration evolved into something much larger. As a result, we successfully introduced Productive to 30 other companies within the Cronos ecosystem. Today, around 800 people across Cronos use Productive. That’s a huge milestone—and one I’m really proud of.

We mostly onboarded ourselves in the beginning, and that worked well because I already had some background in tool implementation. But over the past two years, we’ve been working closely with Luka from your team, and that support has been great. Whenever we had a question or needed help figuring something out, he was there.

I’d say it’s a tie between the custom fields and the dashboards. Custom fields give us a lot of flexibility, especially when integrating Productive with other systems like Cronos or our HR tools. And dashboards, combined with advanced reports, are powerful for creating insights and tracking what truly matters to us. Those two features have really helped us tailor Productive to our needs.

Honestly, I couldn’t imagine running Numble without it. We rely on it for everything—from planning and budgets to reporting and sales tracking. Going back to a more manual or fragmented system just isn’t an option anymore.