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 a Managing Director, 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.

Marshall: As an editor, Productive makes my day a lot easier. Everything from the organization to our communication with the rest of the production team. It’s really important for me to keep focus and not constantly be stepping away from what I’m doing to check in on any questions that I may have.

Productive allows me to just very easily check in on a project, without completely detracting my attention from what I’m working on. Allowing me to stay in a good groove and keep my focus where it’s meant to be. I can very easily leave a comment for my producer or videographers on the same project. It’s just a really simple way of keeping conversations organized by project.

Josh: When I look at how Productive really helped grow our business, I look at the individualized impact that the software had. Every person in our company has a slightly different role—from videographers to video editors, to project managers, to video producers, to digital marketing managers. Everyone on the team has a different set of responsibilities.

Productive allowed us to navigate an autonomous workflow and the happiness I can see in employees when they’re able to just work and just deliver their best, and not worry about operational burdens and gigantic checklists or anything… I look at that and I go “that’s a success metric for us”.

Marshall: Productive transformed our business in the best way possible. When we first started the company, we were a smaller team and the software we were using at the time got us by, but just barely, and we knew that we needed something a little bit bigger and better, just like Productive. It allowed us to scale the company and grow with us, and give us the tools and the abilities and the reporting that we needed to grow the company.

Josh: It’s not specifically the budgets, it’s not the task lists, it’s not the projects—it’s really the happiness that Productive brings our employees. It allows them to work in the way that they want to, as opposed to being forced to run an existing system that was built for someone else, with a different set of needs.

So, Productive really allows us to cater the software around our employees, to make sure that they achieve the best they can. And when they achieve the best they can, that means, as a company—we’re achieving the best we can.

Infinum Grew 350% Using Productive

Ervin: Back then, task management was quite rudimentary, but Productive has developed a ton ever since. After becoming a team lead, I started working with the rest of the project management team on a higher level. We were looking into Reports in Productive. Nowadays, not a week goes by that I don’t go through reports. 

See also: Website Project Management: Expert Guide to Web Builds

Ervin: The great thing about decision making at Infinum is that thanks to Reports, each decision is based on data. Our business decisions are never made on an inner feeling or intuition. Productive gives you answers to questions like what’s the profit, how much are the expenses, what’s the projected revenue, what’s the utilization? That entire set of key metrics is what gives management a basis to move forward. Without tracking time in detail and keeping track of expenses, there’s no way you can make the best possible decisions. 
 
Reports have become our central place to follow key metrics, analytics, numbers, graphs, and—simply said—the pulse of our agency. Currently, it’s hard to imagine what our jobs would look like without reports. It’s a lock-in feature for us, for sure.

Luka: Hiring is another area of our work that’s extremely tricky, so having all our data in one place helped us immensely. There’s no following a gut feeling, wondering if we have or won’t have enough work. We go and check to see: do we have a lot of overtime? How many hours were tracked on each project? Then we check out our teams and see which team is tracking more overtime and which teams are tracking more production hours. All that data helps us understand whether we need to hire more, charge more, give a client a discount, increase a budget, etc. 

Growth in numbers:

Luka: On a daily basis, we monitor:

The Overtime by teams and people insight gives us a clear picture for hiring and the Who’s late with time tracking report is super important for us so we have the most up-to-date reporting possible.

In terms of forecasting, one of the most important metrics we have to watch is: do we have people available in the next 2-3 months, or not? 

Ervin: Other insights that we follow on a daily and weekly basis are:

In this report we compare the revenue we forecasted the year before and recognized revenue from last quarter. 

This is another piece of data we monitor: the amount of hours contractors work in comparison to our in-house teams.

The great thing about this report is that we can easily sync with the rest of the production team and quickly give clients insight as to where we stand with a particular project.

Ervin: I think it’s more of a trigger for getting certain people informed. Some time does get saved, but what’s better about Pulse for me is that you don’t have to actively think about keeping an eye on certain metrics. For example, if I want our financial manager to get informed about all the budgets that were closed in the past quarter, I just set up a pulse to automatically do that for me, instead of me spending time on it and thinking about it.  

Ervin: If someone told us that we’d need to move to a different tool, I think that’d be nearly impossible. I think it’d take a year and a half to migrate to one or more tools.

Luka: There was no point in time when we saw that we needed to use an additional tool. We’ve been monitoring all our key metrics in Productive since the beginning, and I can’t imagine work without it.

Ervin: Since Slack is our primary communication tool, now we save some time on regularly checking notifications and updates in Productive. Since we’ve connected Slack and Productive, now we get automatic updates.

Ervin: Auto-generating invoices in Productive is a game-changer for project managers in Productive. There’s no copying and pasting and double-checking if all the data is accurate. Productive has really eliminated the chance of human errors. All you need to do is make sure that everything in your budget is correct and then you pull that information up when you go to build an invoice. After that, it’s one click to invoice and the Finance team takes over. On average, I save a few hours per month on invoicing. 

Luka: We’ve recently switched from Calamari to Productive to manage time off. The flow around approving and managing schedules is complicated in our agency. With over 350 employees, there are many people who need to be informed about time off, and having that in Productive now is going to be a big money saver in terms of overhead costs.

Before, as the operations manager, once something became a project I was spending a lot of time managing information within those projects. Now I’m mentoring Sara and Julie—our project managers—on how to manage budgets and do things within the tool. They are both uber-talented, smart people and are now showing me better ways to do things, which is awesome. 

I think it’s really helpful that we’re all using Productive on a daily basis. Now my use of the tool is on a higher level though, and more focused on looking into reports and data.

Before, above all, we lacked transparency. At that time our projects were simpler and there weren’t as many of them, but just the fact that we were using various spreadsheets made it hard to have all the data we needed. 

Productive gives us a central place to see where we are. It actually shows us how we’re doing on our budgets and it gives us a place to manage our out-of-pocket expenses. We also do some pretty complicated video shoots and production and it helps manage those complex projects.

I think that in project management there’s a tendency to focus solely on profitability, but it’s inevitable that projects will go over budget, and that’s ok. However, it’s important to have transparency on where that stands, and Productive gives us that visibility.

The other feature we really embraced is having multiple budgets within a project. Now I can close sections of a project and I have the ability to move money around, which I really like. We just started using the PTO, the time off management feature, and that also makes my life easier. I also really like how Scheduling gives me an overview of resource planning.

Absolutely. I tried a lot of different software in the past and none had the sales to project management, invoicing to task and resource management in one tool. To me, all those features are the holy grail of an agency management tool. I knew from my experience that it would help us grow. Now I can’t imagine using any tool other than Productive. 

Yes, absolutely. The modular aspect of it suits our growth. We have all our people in Productive divided into teams which we assign to clients. If only half of the clients are currently active, using the flexibility of custom fields we can see who’s active and inactive. Once you understand how things work in Productive, it’s very flexible and there’s a lot of possibilities for growth and expansion.

Around 80% of the agency uses Productive for time tracking. The project managers and I are using it most and we’re still learning as we go. We embrace the changes that keep coming and we regularly make recommendations that we think would make things easier and better. I think they’ve been received well.

Yes, I’m very disciplined around putting new opportunities in as sales deals and tracking them all the way through, then marking them as sold. That’s an area where I know I’m putting in the data the right way. With time, I’m sure we’ll be getting great results out of the data in reports.

Just based on my history and experience, if we weren’t using Productive now, and we’ve been using it for two and a half years—there’s a very good chance that whatever we would have wouldn’t be fitting all our needs right now. I’ve looked at other tools and I’ve seen how they work. We’d probably be integrating with other tools and that would be frustrating and time consuming.