How SOUP Got a Firm Hold on Their Projects Using Productive

Since we’re a digital marketing agency, it’s really important for us to have an overview of what people are working on. We work across different channels and we have specialists in each in channel. So if a client comes in and they want to do Google ads, Facebook ads and SEO, you have potentially five or six people working on the same project, but it’s crucial that everyone knows what everyone else is doing. Having the ability to have different statuses, move things around between teams, and have designated projects and documents for each client is terrific.

What I really like about Productive is that it’s not trying to be a tool for everybody. It’s really a tool for agencies. And I really like that because some of the pain points that an agency has are not addressed by other tools because it’s not something that is a priority for them.

One of the things that was a game-changer for us was the ability to track time on everything. You can just click into your own, or your colleagues time and see what they have going on.

Having the ability to separate client projects and not having it mix with anything else is really clean. In Projects, you have the ability to add different categories for different services. You can also break down tasks into subtasks and dependencies that are then assigned to different people that need to work on them. I think that kind of workflow is really good.

We also created our own project statuses: to do, in progress, pending internal approval or pending client approval. This makes communication so much easier because you don’t have to ping the person and ask for the status update. I think we’ve definitely saved a lot of time, in just not asking each other where people are at with their work. Probably more than half an hour each day.

I don’t think the team had any difficulties with the adoption of Productive everything was super straightforward. The onboarding took a week or two, where we did a few training sessions and just kind of got going with it. The whole migration process was simple and the tool didn’t feel clunky at all.

Productive is very intuitive and simple to get on top of. I can’t imagine moving away from it. Someone tried to pitch to us to move to another tool and I said to them something along the lines of: “I’m sorry, but I don’t think I’m able to, the tool is so ingrained in our agency operations and there’s a chance my team might try and kill me if we switch.”