Anđela: ZenDev is an agency focused on staff augmentation and product development. I’m the Chief Marketing Officer at ZenDev. I started as a digital marketing specialist almost five years ago.

Farik: And I’m the General Manager at ZenDev. I started working here almost six years ago.

Anđela: If you need experienced developers to strengthen your team or help with specific project parts, we can onboard quickly and get to work immediately. On the product development side, we can take your idea from concept to launch. We ensure your project isn’t just built using the latest tech but is designed to make the most of it, whether it’s an MVP or a complete product. 

We operate primarily in Western Europe and Scandinavia, focusing on the Swedish market, where many client relationships originated.

Our strategic nearshore model combines Swedish business understanding with Bosnian technical expertise, offering clients the perfect balance of cultural compatibility, technical excellence, and cost efficiency.

We have offices in Sweden and Bosnia & Herzegovina.

We serve mid to large-sized enterprises across diverse industries, including:

Our ideal clients are looking for a reliable software partner who understands their business and can help them implement the most effective IT solutions for their specific challenges.

Anđela: Operations, sales, and project management relied on individual work and many Excel spreadsheets. All the data was scattered, making it difficult to see and make informed decisions.

Farik: Resource planning was done manually, without a centralized system, which made processes more complex and less efficient. 
We relied on Excel sheets to track profitability and hours for each team member.

At the end of each month, we’d manually summarize everything. Combining timesheets with project names and creating calendar views by hand.

This approach became a liability:

What started as a simple solution became a serious problem threatening our ability to understand project performance and make good decisions.

Farik: As the team grew, and we reached 13-14 employees, it became clear that the previous way of working was not sustainable. The increasing amount of data in different spreadsheets made it difficult to track key metrics, and manually managing resources, invoicing, and time off became a bit complex.
We were looking for a solution that would allow us to centralize all of our key data – from finances and time management to resource planning and invoicing.

The goal was to have one place where we could easily manage projects, optimize resource utilization, and make better business decisions based on accurate data.

Anđela: After switching to Productive, we quickly noticed significant benefits and changes in our work. The biggest change was centralizing all key data in one place, which allowed us to be more efficient and better organize our business. Instead of relying on various Excel spreadsheets and manual processes, we now have all the key information – from invoicing and resource planning to time tracking and cost prediction – within one tool.

Growing our team has dramatically improved our operational control in two key areas:

Leave management & resource planning

Financial oversight

The unified system is our single source of truth, enabling our sales team to commit to staff augmentation opportunities confidently. At the same time, project managers can plan using actual resource availability data.

This structured approach has directly contributed to improved profitability through more efficient resource allocation and reduced bench time.

Farik: These past few months, I’ve been doing a lot of work in the Reosurcing part of Productive, tracking our utilization and projections and whether we’re meeting them. We also use time management, cost and revenue predictions, and team skills visibility to the fullest, which helps us make informed decisions.
With Productive, our resourcing process is so efficient that what used to require a full-time role in spreadsheets is now streamlined, allowing our team to focus on higher-impact work.

I’ve also been exploring the Scenario Builder since its release, and I can already tell it will greatly impact how we do business.

Anđela: It’s probably Productive’s CRM because we have it all set up, and it’s easy to get reports and the data we need. No more wasting time on making PowerPoints.

I also have to mention something we implemented across the entire company: the weekly and monthly pulses on mail and Slack for almost everything. We created a Risks and Opportunities board where team leads write a weekly update about the status of their projects. If they have stated opportunities or threats based on the level of threat or opportunity, they are sent to accountable people on Slack.

Anđela: Without Productive, our work would be significantly more complex and less efficient. Given the amount of data we monitor and analyze, it would be difficult for us to make accurate decisions and plan for future growth.

Productive is not just a tool for us – it has become a key part of our business, allowing us to optimize processes, learn from data, and strategically plan for the coming months and quarters.

XWP was founded in 2014 and specializes in helping enterprise publishers drive measurable business growth through strategic WordPress development. We focus on solving complex digital publishing challenges by leveraging existing tools in the WordPress industry while also developing custom solutions that balance innovation with efficiency. We primarily serve enterprise clients in digital publishing, fintech, and technology.

When we first launched Productive, I was an Operations Coordinator focused on improving scheduling and reporting for our delivery and engineering teams. Over time, I became the primary contact for Productive across all functionalities within XWP. As an Operations Manager, I now focus on optimizing it to support our operations team.

Before using Productive, our departments were well-organized with documented processes, but there was a disconnect between them. Sales, for example, had limited visibility into delivery, making cross-team alignment more challenging.

We used Harvest and Forecast—Forecast was a straightforward tool for scheduling, and Harvest helped with time tracking. However, we needed more flexibility in reporting to gain deeper insights into financials and workload fluctuations.

Utilization tracking required manual calculations, pulling data into spreadsheets, and extensive filtering. There wasn’t a seamless way to analyze utilization across teams or at different levels of the organization.

We needed something customizable, user-friendly, and affordable. Since we work with contractors and have varying workloads, we require a system that can handle contractual guarantees versus actual capacity.

Our most significant pain points were:

We explored many other options with robust features, but they didn’t fully align with our budget, and the user-experience of other tools was a far steeper learning curve than we were aiming for. What stood out about Productive was:

We saw a lot of changes across various points, but these are the most significant ones:

My favorite feature in Productive is the customizable permissions. They allow us to give our teammates as much visibility as possible while securing sensitive data. I also love the ability to use customizable fields and formulas in reporting- it’s been a total game-changer for us. Building and sharing specific reports has saved us time and supported efficient decision-making across our organization. I’m also a huge fan of the recent updates to resourcing. The improved visibility into individual absences from the “project” view has made scheduling much smoother and more efficient.

Without Productive, we would lose valuable time reverting back to countless spreadsheets, and rebuilding our current processes would take months. Our ability to track our utilization, manage our fluctuating team capacities, and resource our teams efficiently would be significantly impacted.

Before Productive, we used Google Sheets to track and manage projects through Asana, with a bit of Trello for Kanban-style project work. It was fine at first, but as we got bigger, these tools couldn’t keep up with the complexity we were dealing with. We had spreadsheets to manage our finances, but keeping up-to-date with what was happening on the ground was hard. Nothing was automated, so we were constantly updating things manually, which was time-consuming and could easily fall behind reality.

We’d been running on Asana and spreadsheets for a while, and I started thinking it could be much better. We wanted something that could give us a real-time overview of our whole business and serve as a single source of truth. It was getting to the point where we needed an integrated system that would handle everything from daily task management to high-level forecasting.

While exploring options, we came across Productive, and I was immediately drawn to its clean, intuitive interface. It didn’t take much convincing to see that this was the right platform for us.

We’re rolling it out in phases. First, we got the team used to Productive for briefings and project management. I set everyone up, got them communicating through the platform, and started pushing our project briefs through Productive. From there, we moved on to budgeting and resource planning, which is a game changer. Before, we were planning maybe a month ahead; now, we can plan for the entire year.

The next phases will cover invoicing, CRM functionality, and profitability tracking and reporting. We’re currently in phase three, so we still have much to explore.

Definitely. Even in these early stages, it’s already so much easier to track our resources. We can now see exactly how much time we spend on projects versus what we’re billing, which gives us a clearer picture of where we’re over-servicing or undercharging. This insight alone has helped us start having better conversations with clients about project scope and budgeting.

I love the flexibility to customize workflows to fit our needs. We wanted a service desk to handle client requests separately from our main projects, so I created a dedicated “Service Desk” project within Productive. Now, clients can submit requests directly, which are automatically formatted to meet our standards. Our project managers get a Slack notification when a request comes in. This setup keeps everything organized, allows clients to see all their requests in one place, and helps us prioritize with them.

It’s been a huge help, both for us and our clients.

Right now, Productive is giving us the foundation we need to scale. We’re not using it to its full potential yet, but I know this system will grow with us as we grow. The whole team is getting on board, and using Productive for day-to-day tasks is becoming second nature. We’re building something here that will support our ambitions as we expand, and I’m excited to see where it takes us.

Aaron: We use Productive to care for our employees, which has been an important contributing factor to having a 98% retention rate this past year. Each employee in the company is set a task in Productive, which holds all the necessary information about that person. The managers who are responsible for their teams are in Productive all the time, and they can’t ignore the tickets that are coming through, which means problems get solved extremely fast.

We have a series of “Tier Action Boards” set up in Productive, with the specific goal of categorizing issues and delegating them to key stakeholders in the company to implement solutions. If you want oatmeal in the kitchen or maybe a taller desk, we’ll see it here. A subset of people is responsible for solving these tasks, and when they can’t, they are elevated to the next board, which has a different subset of people higher in the leadership structure. Some tasks go directly to the tier one board, which is my board and can be seen by the upper management. Those tasks are usually high-level, such as approving requests for promotion, contract re-negotiations, work visa submissions, grievances, or performance-related issues. Every week, I sit down with the Head of Human Resources and review my tier-one items.

Mark: We really like the fact that we can use different types of budgets. We use a blend of budgets in Productive; we use the time and materials budget and add the do-not-exceed on top of it. We can use the time and materials budget until the do-not-exceed kicks in, and then we have no more revenue coming in from that budget. That’s how our contracts are built. Having that visibility and seeing your projections and roadmaps is great. Budgeting and cost tracking have been much more helpful and quicker since switching to Productive. I have a bunch of filters, and I can check where our budgets stand for each project, making presenting financials so much easier.

Aaron: Productive has allowed us to be more accountable. When people have concerns, complaints, or are confused about something, they oftentimes speak about it, but most of the time, they don’t hear back. Productive really filled that gap for us. We’re able to engage in dialogue with our employees quickly and effectively. That’s probably the single biggest value proposition for me.

Mark: We would have to put much time and effort into a system that would unify the entire company. It’s a really long process; the last time we did it, the preparation process lasted about a year.

Aaron: I think the psychology side would be our biggest problem. It took about a year to get everything set up and fully onboarded. I think everyone is really happy with Productive now, and it would be really unfortunate if we had to switch it our for a different tool.

The issue was that the tools we were using at the time weren’t communicating, so much of the work had to be done manually. Resource planning was done in Sheets, which needed to be updated manually almost every day. When it came to gathering financial utilization data, we took a lot of rough estimates from Asana and Google Sheets, which led to many inaccuracies and distrust of the data. If even one metric was off, it could throw off the entire calculation, essentially making the data completely useless. We really needed an all-in-one tool.

Moving to Productive freed up about 40% of my time, and I was able to concentrate my efforts on other, more important areas of the business. One of the biggest changes has been accuracy. It’s pretty rare to have accuracy in an agency setting since there are a lot of moving parts. I don’t have to rely on someone to input costs, it’s all done pretty much automatically.

I’d say it’s got to be the overhead calculator. I generated all the financial reports for our agency, and no other software out there was able to calculate the overheads and spread them across all our clients. That was so important for us because other tools would show it as profit, and we would have to manually spread them across our clients. If I wanted an accurate report on overhead spread across clients, I would’ve spent hours working on it, but with Productive, we can generate that report automatically.

The ability to produce dashboards for both the team and management is really amazing. We can bring up management dashboards in just a few clicks and check our business performance for the month, without management having to pour hours of work into those reports.

I think the combination of project management and financial aspects makes Productive shine above the rest of the platforms.

I think moving to another software would be a step backward for us. We’ve got everything centralized in one place now, and I don’t think we need any other software to run the business.

Before Productive, I felt like my role was updating spreadsheets. With Productive, I’m able to focus more on actually analyzing the data than just putting numbers into spreadsheets.

When it comes to agencies, there are little to no constants in the work we do. Each client is different, and they have different needs. This is why data tracking is extremely important for us. If you’re working things out on the fly, you’re bound to make a mistake at some point—and it might lead you down the wrong path. Productive allows us to have as much accuracy as possible, which is a make-or-break for a lot of agencies.

Draženka: Our company is only 2 years old and we faced a really big growth during that time. Last year, we grew from 48 to 98 people. I don’t even want to imagine onboarding 50 people without Productive. Our onboarding process is super efficient in Productive. 

We have a template in Productive – called the Onboarding project and we open it the moment our candidate accepts an offer. That way we have everything that needs to be done for the new employee in one place. 

Anamarija: The hiring process involves multiple individuals from various departments, including HR, management, design, and marketing. With Productive, updates and mentions are delivered directly to our inbox, ensuring that nothing goes unnoticed. This streamlines the process of sharing updates and getting feedback, making it faster and more efficient. 

Ivan: Productive is not just flexible, it also adapts to our growing needs. Our company’s ever-changing business processes are easily handled with its customization options. 

Productive’s flexibility gave us the opportunity to adapt our initial configuration to the bigger organization, but also keeps on expanding as we do. As a fast-growing company, we follow the inspect-and-adapt approach to all aspects of our business. 

Ivan: I get most of our business data from Reports. The data is generated in real time and it’s sent to us automatically. 

Last year we had over 80% utilization company-wide. Having these metrics in real-time helps us make data-driven decisions. 

We recently also expanded our insights with additional reporting and alerting triggers, that gives us a very good heads up when the above would change. This then gives us enough time to react, and make strategic plans.

Dominik: Budgeting and invoicing would be very difficult. 

Draženka: I don’t even want to imagine onboarding 50 people without using Productive…

Anamarija: Unproductive!

Mateja: I would feel lost in space and time.
 
Bello: Doing honest work, but blind.

Luz: I look at client services at Saffron and I also help with reporting. I work very closely with Finance, so we look at things like team utilization, billability, how much time we spent on new business for example. We also look at job performance, how effectively we are managing our resources. We look at future utilization, it allows us to plan a little bit better. Questions like: how tight are we gonna be in the team, do we have capacity? Productive helps us forecast—not only the performance of our jobs today, but of jobs in the future. 

Andrew: I’m responsible for ensuring that the projects run to budget and time, working with the teams and essentially being the focal point on the projects, making sure that we deliver what the client’s brief is.

Andrew: The thing that was seen straight away was that project performance and scheduling data was available for us literally at the click of a finger. I would say that whenever you implement a particular product or a platform, it takes a couple of months. But I think once everyone was using it in the right way, it was super obvious that when we needed project data, we were able to access it instantly. 

The most important benefit from Productive, specifically for me, was the ability to be able to access my project performance and scheduling of the team in real-time. That, essentially, allows me and the team to be able to adjust the direction of the project, if need be, much sooner–rather than having to deal with it at a much later stage. 

Luz: The main benefit we get from Productive is planning, clarity, everyone working towards one system. There’s a sense of shared ownership also, so it’s not that it only falls on one person. People can take ownership of their jobs and plan the whole thing out, you can collaborate with team members, so there’s also visibility about things. It facilitates reporting, hugely. It’s very easy to use. Also, I think one of the biggest things for me is the fact that it’s constantly improving.

Luz: I think reporting has definitely improved, it’s quicker, it’s faster, it’s more accurate. Forecasting has improved, 100%, because we have more intel about the business. So, for example, in a type of job A, how successful have we been? How many people have we used on that kind of project? Then it helps us plan for a similar situation in the future.  

The big benefit we have is that everyone in the company knows what they’re on. Different people have different views, they have different access to different information, but everyone is aware of what they need to be aware of and hence, the planning, the work, the effectiveness is better.

Andrew: For me, what I was surprised with was the ease of use of the platform. What I was really surprised by was the fact that Productive continuously looked to improve the platform, to build out the platform, and they worked really closely with us. So, at the very outset of the project, we worked with the Productive team to set up what the needs of Saffron were. I felt really supported, I felt the platform itself is continuously evolving in a very positive way. It didn’t feel like just a plug and play and then, you know–we washed our hands of you. 

Luz: Customer support works really well. There’s a person on the other side who responds immediately and gets onto it.

Luz: Overall, I think Productive is really easy to use, it’s in constant improvement and I think it’s embraced easily by different team members… I would highly recommend it.

Matt: I think quite often, it’s easy to lose touch with the scope of a project and sort of see how long it’s going on and who you’re going to need along that journey. So it’s quite good being able to plan the long term, as well. 

Andrew: I definitely think it’s a very close relationship between Saffron and the Productive team. When we need something, they’re very much there for us.

I’ve only got positive things to say about Productive. It has really changed how we do things at Born Social. We timed the launch of Productive with the hiring of our first Resource Manager, so it was timed really well with us going through a change management process of centralizing our resource function. To have a fresh slate and a new tool to do that with was a really great opportunity.   

When we were on the hunt for a new tool, one of the most important things for us was the user experience. You can’t underestimate finding a tool that feels like your company. Productive was exactly that for us. Onboarding and getting the team engaged in it has been super simple and smooth because of how intuitive the platform is. And, yeah, one of the things I love the most is that it looks and feels like Born Social.

I can’t speak more highly of the customer success and service team at Productive. We have moved from a tool where getting help and support was clunky—it was through a ticket system that could sometimes take days or weeks at times for requests. Having the internal chat function at Productive, along with the 3-month dedicated Slack Support for onboarding has been a real game changer.  

In my role as Head of Operations, I can often be the funnel for requests, but thanks to the features at Productive I don’t need to be.  Everyone can get their own help & support when they need it. That saves me time to spend on bigger things across the business. So, Productive’s customer success through those tools and that intuitive UX has been just an amazing time-save for us as a business.

We’ve been using Productive for around 8 months. If we look at the Scheduling, Budgeting, Time tracking, and Reporting—even during month 1, the reporting we were getting out of there—we felt like the data integrity was right. We were understanding how our time was being used better than we ever had before. We’ve had a big improvement in time tracking accuracy, particularly throughout the last quarter.

Out of the key business metrics we’re tracking, I’m focused on 3-4 that are the most important to us. I immediately built a series of custom reports based on these key metrics, and it’s been so powerful to get such a clear picture of how we’re managing our time Recovery is perhaps our most important one. Recovery for us is like utilization but of just billable time.

Thanks to Productive’s Scheduling feature, and having our first dedicated Resource Manager, I would say we’ve been about a 10% growth in recovery so far. So you can really see the impact of better management of time in our commercials.

Next is our tracked vs. scoped time. So, of the time we sold, how much have we tracked? This is the metric that continues to grow in accuracy. With diving into that and really being able to see on an account-by-account level which roles are over-burning, or where we haven’t sold enough time—we’re getting all that clarity through the reports now.

We also look at account contribution. For us, that’s the profitability of accounts. That’s really helped us see which clients are bringing in a good margin and how we can make operational changes to improve that.

Yes. It felt like for the first time we could see more clearly where we’ve got time available to sell, so that helped us use all of the time we had. Through the pipeline feature and Placeholder scheduling, we’ve got a clearer 90-day forecast.

All in all Productive has played a key role in how we plan resourcing and hiring—really fueling that growth for us. Our headcount has grown 27% so far in 2022, and it feels like we’re on track to hit 30% growth by the end of the year.

If I had to describe the one thing that Productive does for us it’s decision-making. Not just in my role, but across our finance and operations team. We are in and out of the platform on a daily basis, using the data and the reporting to help us make key commercial decisions about how we’re running the business, running our accounts, how we’re hiring and managing resources. It really is the tool for helping us make decisions.

Fréderique: Productive was more elaborate than the other tools we used, and for the whole Makerstreet collective, it was really important that we use one and the same tool for all our companies because now we are now working on more projects together. From the beginning, it was very user-friendly for us and I noticed team members liked using it, and management liked using it.

At first, people don’t like change, but then when you say “Just try!” Everyone was quiet and they said it was really easy, and now they find it really nice to work with.

Maike: What’s nice about Productive is now we use scheduling as an actual data resource to create our financial forecasts. So the actual data in scheduling is the source for our financial forecasting now. So no more manual work, which is really nice and it gives everybody an extra push to make sure that their scheduling is accurate because it’s the basis of the financial forecast. So, if you want an accurate financial forecast, if you want that—you should have accurate scheduling. We’re really happy with that.

Fréderique: I think the greatest benefit is that we have it all in one tool, in one—all together. Before Productive and before we used the other tool, we were like 15 people and an Excel might do the trick. Not to the best, but it did it. You know you have a lot in your head, so it worked… But, because we grow, that’s the main reason why we need it, and why it’s so helpful.

Maike: What’s really nice about it is it enables us to work easily together across the whole company, but it still gives us the opportunity to treat the different departments as separate businesses, which they still are.

With growth comes a bigger need for one source of truth, and that’s what it gives us, and that’s really important.

Mark: In our previous set-up we had a “tool soup”, a combination of a wide range of applications, providing us with different solutions for different problems. Then our quest started: to find one solution which could provide us support in the whole funnel: from sales to planning and budget management, but also on the BI part… and that’s when we came up to Productive.

Mark: We really think that if you can bring a tool to your organization, it’s a tool that should support your organization. If you then bring a UI that is not very user-friendly and people need to work with it… At the end of the day, it becomes a hindrance instead of a solution.

That was the thing that also caught my eye—the fact that it’s very user-friendly, very intuitive, and it doesn’t take a lot of cognitive energy to find the thing you’re looking for. That was the thing that surprised us very positively and also made us go for Productive.

Mark: The first benefit is that it works integrated: so, from creating a deal, towards a budget, towards your planning, towards your actual time tracking, and then onwards towards your invoicing and insights.

The cool thing about Productive, I think, is the fact that it’s all very user-friendly, as I mentioned before. So all the screens are very easy to handle and they work really fast.

What I really love is the fact that you can play around with it and create your own views on every different aspect of the data. It’s very easy to filter, select and export data and also save your views. Especially if you combine it with the insights part, then the real power comes alive.

Bastiaan: My role specifically within DotControl is that I’m Head of Operations, so I coordinate the team that’s responsible for all project management and client coordination… basically the management between our clients and our teams.

I think the main thing that we wanted to solve was, on the one hand, having one system in place for our entire project administration—so from planning to time tracking, to project reporting, to clients. The other thing was that we wanted to have a little bit more insights on projects, to know how our projects are running, and how are the financials looking. Productive really gives us more clear insights and possibilities to create reporting. That’s really a benefit for us.

I think especially for my role, I had a lot of support during the implementation because we transferred from our old systems to Productive, and the support there was really great. We had a dedicated person guiding us through using Productive, doing training with us, with all the people on the team. That really helped us to quickly adapt to Productive and quickly make a switch to this new system. I really liked that part.

Mark: In the past, we were planning month-by-month, now we’re doing 90-day rolling forecasts on utilization to have way better utilization and at the end of the day, better billability and also more ease for the team. So you can discover where you’re overbooking and where stress exists. Do I have the right people on the right project? Which is not only a benefit on the financial side but also on the human side. 

Due to the fact that we now have better insights, we also have better monthly reporting, which really supports the overall performance of the organization.

We saw that the total performance of the organization was moving up, from 50% to 60%, from 60% to 70%, which is really great and we’re really thankful for that.