Jumping back into maybe one of our last sessions for the month. So we got our team here a full full crew today and today we're just going to be talking through how we do framing for a project. So typically we get all the ideas out to, you know, we may have some notes from a client like, hey, I want this feature.
The first thing we'll typically do is try to go to a frame, try to create a frame for that project. So think of it like we're building a room.
And let's say we're building a house and we want to build the kitchen. So we need to know, is this a small kitchen? Is it a large kitchen? How much time? What's the budget for this kitchen?
Because you can sometimes have, you know, a $5,000 kitchen on a real budget, or you could have a $100,000 kitchen, just depends on what you want to build and what you want to invest in it. So this helps us frame kind of just knows where are we going to start and end this project? What are we not doing in this project?
I've got some other videos on framing, but I thought it'd be great to do it live. And I'm going to talk through a little bit of how we would get to this point of framing and some of the process we took and then I'm going to share with the team and we're going to kind of frame it up as a team. You guys can just watch it.
We do this a lot. But the cool thing is we're going to be working on our own dashboard. We have our own agency dashboard that we use for tracking time and syncing tools like toggle and notion. And we're needing to build a new view for that. So
the client in this is kind of us. And so on our team. So we're going to get to all weigh in on what we
are looking for some of the problems and so forth. So let me jump in and share my screen here.
So first off, I'll just say quickly, we have this little dashboard where we have time tracking, we can jump back in the months and like see like where people spend time, who spent which hours, what projects we worked on, did we go over budget?
A lot of different links to jump into notion from a particular project if we need to. And then it syncs
data from toggle into our hours. So we know if projects are on schedule or over and things like that. So we typically we still use notion as kind of our primary source of truth. But we have this tool.
And we're using it more and more. And one of the things that we've not been able to do is kind of everybody knowing like what they're specifically working on and then kind of what they're
budget is kind of, you know, what people can expect to make in a month. And then also on the flip side, having clients be able to sign in and kind of see their
view of like, what are they paying for for this month? And what can they expect for the month? So we'll jump into that. The way we attack this was we had a session in
a team meetup here, our first one. And we all sat in this room. We've got a bunch of stickies together, a lot of coffee and
we essentially just went through this process where each person would put down one idea on one sticky. Maybe you've done creative sessions like this.
Definitely way more fun to do it in person. But if you can't do it in person, you can do this virtually on something like FigJam. And you can pull these little stickies out and everybody can make
their own stickies kind of live on a board. And so it took 10-15 minutes. Everybody just puts their ideas like, oh, I had an idea for this idea for that.
Each idea on a sticky. After the timer's up, then we take the time for each person to take, you know, to go and present their ideas. And so they get to
stand up and as they put their ideas on, we had these little like a big glass window. So we stuck, you know, ideas on that. And we started to group the ideas. So
Macy has taken the time to take all of these stickies and turn them into digital stickies. And so now we can start to kind of look through all these things. We had some stuff we thought would be nice for the client to have in our dashboard, some things that we needed on the back end for admin.
You know, tracking team rates and such like stuff like that. And then having things for the team. So there's a lot of things that the team asked, like things were like status page, having
you know, different interventions to toggle, see how we could like,
I don't know, some of them are just general things like having a hill chart style graph from Basecamp, maybe somehow in the project. These are just little ideas. So each one of these
could be turned into its own product, but it's just a way to kind of see what's all top of mind. And I would say that one of the things generally, we won't go through all this today, but one of the things that came out was just someone
just for team members being able to see specifically their own view. And so that's what we're going to try to tackle today. And I'm going to flip over to this view, and then I'll do this. And hopefully if you guys want to be on, you can turn yourself on or turn yourself off.
But you guys are all welcome to jump into this chat. So the way that we do this, it's all on one massive board, first of all.
You'll see, I just, I'm just dropping things in here, stickies. We're going to go over to the framing section over here. And it's just really nice because you can keep it all on one board and quickly glance back at things. So we use this a lot.
And we'll kind of outline a few different things.
So we'll do this as a team, and I'm
going to get out of teaching mode,
and we're going to get into work mode here.
We put little boxes, and we'll write little things in here,
and then we'll have something here called not doing.
And then we may talk about, typically, the appetite
is also here, just how long do we want to spend on it.
So here we go.
So with that context, I'll just open it up for the team.
The general thing would be some sort of with the dashboard
or with where you guys are going.
I know Macy may have a different view from an admin standpoint.
I have some thoughts.
And then maybe switch it like this, or can we do that?
Yeah, OK, we'll try this.
Sorry, it's the first time we're trying it with everybody on.
So we could talk about problems.
Sorry, it's not a solution.
It's outcomes.
See, nobody caught that.
I wrote solution by habits.
We call that outcomes, like what do we
want to have by the end of this.
So let's just jump in.
We'll start throwing some down in here.
But if you guys are thinking about knowing your budget,
knowing what work you're assigned to,
can I just talk through some problems first on that?
I would say shared visibility between team members
and administrators on the future projects
that we'll be working on.
OK.
Because I may talk to a client and get something.
This is something that we've run into.
Like, I talk to a client.
Yeah, this is like this week's stuff.
So that's why I figured it would be top of mind.
So we'll say for team member and admin.
OK, so there's not a single view.
And I'll say single point of truth,
because we do use Notion.
And so we have a bunch of views where
I can see maybe from one standpoint what's
going on with the client.
But you may be looking at a different view.
And what happens is we could also say another problem
generally is that the project, a lot of times,
clients will buy four weeks for the month.
And they won't necessarily decide
what they want to use those four weeks for until we're
like kind of in a few weeks into the month.
So we could even say like project, even priorities
sometimes like shift during an active month
after weeks have been purchased.
OK, so the other thing I'm not doing here
is being too concise.
I'm just being a little bit wordy for the sake of getting
it out.
We can come back and clean this up in a minute.
The other thing we can think about is on the outcome here.
We do need like an easy way to say almost like reset
the priority for the month with like say team, admin,
and client visibility or something like that.
So we could change this.
A lot of times as well, we do this literally
in a FigJam board.
And then we may go to a client.
And I'll pick someone here.
We'll pick a client that we got a few things going on with.
We have 10 of these columns that we'll
use to say like hey, for December,
we're working on these three projects.
You can see there's a one week, a four week, a one week.
But then like something, this may move to January,
for example.
But no one gets an alert.
We may have a conversation with the client.
So I just want to make sure that it's really easy to track
when something syncs.
And some of the cool things as well with this dashboard
is that all the projects in Notion
are already synced to our database.
All the timesheets are synced.
The timesheets and the toggle projects
are already linked to the Notion projects.
So we have everything we need, all the ingredients
to kind of make up whatever view we want.
And I think maybe there's like some sort of single dashboard
view for a team member to see past, like present,
and upcoming months or something.
OK, I'll stop talking.
Anything else from?
What are some issues maybe, Macy, you have as well?
Because you're coming from a different point of view
from more admin.
OK.
Oh, are you muted, or is that me?
No, it's muted, I think.
Am I muted? Can you hear me?
There you go, now you're good.
Okay, I think having some sort of notification in some sort would be nice.
Whenever something gets, like, yesterday with you and Ira working and moving around projects,
like, this got done, this got changed, the client wanted this done.
Having some sort of, like, I don't know if it's an admin-automated notification,
where only admins get notified whenever things move around,
because, or else I have no idea, unless I'm going in and searching one by one within the projects.
Yeah, I'd say notifications, but also maybe, like, a log of it,
so we can see, like, if we clicked into a project, we could say that, like, the project got started on this date,
then on this date, you know, it moved from December to January,
on this date it changed from two weeks to three weeks,
on this date, you know, like, a log, I think would be helpful.
Yeah.
Maybe, like, obviously we're all developers, so, like, a change log would be awesome,
when changes are to a project.
Okay.
Yvette, you think it's, like, I'll just say notification.
And I don't know if it's, like, it's not a notification I have to subscribe to.
It's, like, if I'm an admin position, I automatically get notified for all of those things,
because I think I could, I mean, like, let's say in Notion,
I could choose to comment on something and get every notification for everything,
but not necessarily if the week changed or if the whatever changed.
So I feel like getting notified on all of those things rather than just, like, a comment was left.
Yeah.
That's good.
We do obviously get notifications in our inbox here in Notion, but these things can get lost.
And if Ira changes it hypothetically and doesn't leave a comment, this never happens,
but then, you know, we would have to go and look and see.
I think there is a log, but, again, some of the views in Notion are not very clear.
I think if you went into a project, there may be, like, a history.
I'm not going to try to get into it now, but I think there is a history technically in Notion.
But, yeah, you could go back and look at the page history, I think, but that's not ideal.
Also, people can close comments, and then they can disappear.
So I don't think that's – it's probably good up to a point, but we maybe have outgrown some of that.
And also, key decisions need to be made because typically these aren't just –
like, one of our team members are not sitting by themselves typically just moving things around.
It's normally like we're actually on a call with the client or we're getting, you know, live decisions from them.
So we just want to capture that in some way because we also work very autonomously.
So, like, if Ira wants to meet with the client and they're having a decision,
like, I don't need, like, me and Macy and other people to be in on that call.
So we want to have a little bit of autonomy where they – Ira can just make that change.
Like, if the client agrees and Ira agrees to something, like, it doesn't really matter what everybody else –
you know, we may have an opinion, but, like, they're in the moment, they're close to the work.
Let them decide in the moment kind of what to do.
We just want to make sure we log it and track it for billing and that –
so we don't get to the end of the month and there's confusion.
So that's good.
Maybe record that output notification here.
So Lucian just jumped on.
We're just – we're framing up some of the Novo dashboard stuff we talked about,
if you have any other problem statements or things you may have.
Think of, like, the last 30 days.
Like, we probably have all hit some confusion.
I would say there is, like – it's not clear, like, how much –
what I'm getting paid and when.
I would say, like, it's not super clear that, like, hey, this project got approved here
and it's going to get paid on this date or even just a good log of numbers.
Because one thing that's also confusing is everybody can see Notion,
so we don't have dollar signs in Notion.
It's kind of one of our rules.
Because clients are looking at it, team members, admins looking at it.
It gets kind of a little bit messy.
So this may be something we could do in a dashboard where, like, if Lucian signed in,
we know the user is Lucian, so he can see all of his own stuff
without having to, like, share with other team members or admins or whatever.
What are some other friction points you guys have right now?
I think connected with the project priority changes and also with what Macy mentioned
about having a changelog, I think it would be interesting if this changelog would also
encompass not only product changes or new releases, but also a decision changelog.
We are specifically not prioritizing this, or we are prioritizing this today, or we decided
that this is not important, because sometimes these decisions get lost and it's a bit difficult
to reference back and say, why is this this way?
And not on the code standpoint, but from the decision that was made regarding the project
itself, I think especially for long-running projects of over six months, this starts to
be really useful, because you can point back in time and say, hey, this is why we decided
this, and this may or may not be a good decision now that we have more information about it.
And I think this would be interesting for us to also improve our decision making and
having this distract, because we kind of have this on the project on Ocean, but we have
to, for instance, if we have a big product that has six projects and this decision is
logged on them, you have to go in each project and see what was the decision about.
But if you have just one big decision log for that customer specifically, like seeing
it as a customer and not as a project, I think that would be very interesting.
That's cool, because you're saying, if we have this system, we technically could create
not just, because I added this word project here, because it wasn't super clear, but record
project change log, but what you're talking about is almost like zooming out and saying,
like, what's all of the projects going on with this client for November, you know?
Exactly, like the monster map we have with all the projects, but like from a decision
standpoint of why we decided to prioritize that when we did.
What do you guys think of that?
Anything else, thoughts on this client change log?
Yes, no?
Sounds like there's almost like two categories of decisions.
There's like architecture decision, which there's like good standards that exist, like
ADRs, architecture decision records, and there's like project roadmap, like, okay, we thought
we needed a feature, but actually we don't, like we got more clarity, so a different decision
of like client side, like project side.
Okay, so this would be a good, we could keep this very much, like, that's good to define
what we said the word changes, which is super vague, so it's, I think that it's almost decisions
made, like you found this thing, this technical limitation or whatever, we're in the middle
of a project, we thought we could include this idea to, let's say, I'm trying to think
of a good example, like I was working on a project now where we need a new user role,
so we have one of the optional items for this project is, are we going to add this new user
role or just kind of make it work with existing conditionals and logic?
So it could be something where we decide, we have a, we look at it and we're like, that's
actually going to be a lot more work, we can't fit it into one week, we have a conversation
with the client and we explain it and he's like, no problem, we don't need the new user
role.
So like something like that, where we can kind of track that, it's really decisions,
I don't need to know like meeting notes of this person said this and that one said that,
that's kind of useless, it's just like, what's the sort of the outcome of a meeting was,
they're okay with us changing the due date from this date to this, they're okay with
us even, sometimes this will happen as well, like we'll have a two week project and another
one week project and then they'll cancel the one week project and they'll move the budget
to make the first two week project a three week project.
I don't, it's not like, that's not best practices but it happens, like this is like what happens,
they kind of figure out that actually this is so important, we're going to increase the
appetite once we get into it.
So those may be those types of changes.
But I think maybe what we could shape out of or frame out
of this would be the technical.
You say it was ADR, did you call that?
AR?
Yes, ADR, Architecture Design Records.
Yeah, records, yeah.
Which is very good.
Totally agreed.
I want to bring another point, which
is because we have monster map, like a sequence
of smaller project that have a big thing.
And so far, we've been using projects
as a kind of stand-in for that.
Sometimes there's like higher level decisions
that go into that.
Do we need to even consider that for this framing shaping
session?
Or we kind of keep them out of scope?
You're saying like, tell me how are you connecting that?
So we have the monster map, which we call like a task grid.
It's not called monster map anymore.
Oh, yeah, monster project, sorry.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
So that's a good example.
Let me see if I can pull one up while we're talking.
But yes.
So kind of like, I would just call that client level.
Those are kind of like zooming out from, OK, here's
the client.
It's this view, actually, where there's like almost months.
We have a bunch of little projects
that are all making up one big project, potentially.
I think for now, maybe just organizing by month
is the easiest, because it's.
But I also wanted to potentially in 2026
challenge us that we may not have to do things by a month.
And it actually sounds more chaotic.
But if we had a good system, I think it's actually possible.
Where if a project came in on the 12th,
it gets approved, paid for, you work on it for two weeks,
it's done, and that person gets paid on the end of the project,
and then we're done, and we move on to the next project.
It doesn't have to wait, because it doesn't quite always
fit inside of a calendar.
It could be a little bit more loose.
I'll just throw that out there.
We don't have to do that.
But potentially, if we're going to keep it in a calendar
view, like by month, that's probably fine for now.
But I want to see if I can pull up the tribe one real quick,
because that's a good example.
And I would just say, if we're not clear about it,
I'll just say that we're not doing it for this,
just to keep it simple.
Because what we could end up doing
is like, and let's call that, yeah,
you called it a monster project view.
We'll just, for now, keep this loose in FigJam or whatever
notes, because we do have these multi-month projects that
do take up a lot.
I'll have to find it.
Oh, it's called monster project here.
So this is a lot of different things.
September, we started breaking up different things
we wanted to do.
And this is a two weeks.
That's one week.
And they're all in this big architecture
of getting off of Firebase, for example,
which is not a one week, a one project.
It's a grouping of multiple projects.
So we have different framed docs,
I think, throughout this one.
I don't know if this is the best example.
But yeah, this is a framing issue here.
We started to frame stuff up.
So I don't think we have a good system for this yet.
So we probably don't want to lock it in to a software view.
This is probably still good to have it loose.
Cool.
I could also share this with you guys.
Sweet.
Anything else that's up?
One, I'll just say, I know Macy, knowing specific,
like knowing which projects are paid from clients
and which team members to get paid for which projects,
this is a bit of a nightmare, especially when
things span two months.
So like something starts at the end of the month,
and it goes into it.
So one week is in November.
Another week gets done in December.
Or do you pay for half the project in the first month
and the second month?
And then I think in one case, we had it split
where Luchin took a week and Janata took a week.
That stuff just like, it shouldn't be hard, but it is.
It is hard.
And I think we're always, like this
has been helpful because we've already
got a little bit more clarity here where the gaps are.
But we're always pushing for a little bit more clarity.
So like if a team member joins, we've got a project,
we figured out like, cool, here's
like this two-week project.
You're taking and running with it.
And they should know exactly to the cent
like what they're getting paid and what day they're
going to get paid for that.
So we're always pushing for a little bit more clarity.
And I think that's been helpful, too,
because we've already got a little bit more clarity
here where the gaps are.
But we're always pushing for like if something
It doesn't need to be vague, and that way everybody has clarity up front, and it just
feels a bit vague, there's no excuse for that.
helps get that, where it could be confusion down the road, kind of bring it super clear
today and we can have a conversation about it now when it's not, where we can set expectations
ahead of time versus, no one likes having surprises where it's like, oh, I finally finished
the thing, and then you realize, oh, it's different than what you thought or the budget
or whatever.
You guys know what I'm saying.
And same for clients, like, I don't know if you've been in agency world for a while, but
clients and really no one loves surprises at the end of a project.
So this is good. If we could, if we could have the logs would be good, I think.
And I think this is helpful.
I don't know if this is maybe a different problem.
I don't know what you guys think, if this is potentially like the record changing in
the notifications.
These almost feel like two problems now, like, kind of what you're working on and
because what you're working on and the payments side is kind of one project.
Then this other thing is knowing like when things change.
I don't know. They're kind of related.
I don't know what you guys think.
Yeah, I think because I'm not sure, but like when we say notification, like, do you
really mean a notification like or it's more or it's more like a list, like it's a
view of like showing the changes or it's like a actual notification that would be
like email or push or something like that.
Yeah, that would maybe be at the solution level.
That's why I did that deliberately.
Like, the main thing is that it's a little more active, you know, where it would be
great if like Ira and the client want to connect randomly on a Tuesday morning at
some time. They connect, they make a decision.
Macy doesn't know that that meeting took place on like a Thursday morning, random,
you know, so just almost like a more of an active thing.
I didn't go to a solution because we could have said Slack notification.
We could have said email notification, could have said text.
You know, like we got specific.
I'm trying to keep it a little bit vague because we may change it depending on the
budget allowed.
So could there be some sort of approval process that like if if Ira and I'm only
using that because we talked yesterday.
So like if there was a could there be an approval process where like Ira and client
talked and like they made a decision, but like Bruce and I had no idea and there
needs to be some sort of like approved.
I viewed this now you can move on or is that too?
I don't know how that actually works.
But one one cool thing I love and I'm sure everybody else does this, but we kind of
use inbox zero.
So like I see this thing, even though I said beautiful and Lucian just gave it like
this emoji, I can just archive that.
And now I've kind of it's off my list.
Just kind of nice.
So I don't make sure I don't miss anything.
I don't know if we need to worry about like I don't know at some point it has to
like we have to we have to be looking ourselves like I think a notification is
helpful. But you're saying like if I notified you and then I just didn't look at
the thing, you know.
Yeah. I want to get to the framing of that.
It could be a bit more clarity because it sounds like we're framing this for clarity
for like Macy, you know, what's getting built and for ourself, what's getting built.
And they're like two different types of decisions.
Like one of them is like, oh, we're not going to do a button here.
We'll put it there. That doesn't matter to Macy.
But another kind of decisions that the client says, oh, you know what, let's do an
extra week because we want to take that time.
So that one should be like visible to everyone.
It seems like.
And we may get here and say it's record like scope and like timeline changes
potentially or yeah, maybe.
Timeline related project changes, maybe.
What do you guys think of that?
Because it's really like if the scope changes, increases or move it to a different
month, like those are kind of big.
Yeah, if the scope.
Change or change for project.
I don't know, getting in the weeds here, change.
Yeah.
Okay we can because I think there's like there's sort of the logging of what is
happening and I things where I think it's starting to be two projects because
it's there's this which I would say there's some sort of view that helps if
I was to title this whole thing you know in a single sentence it's a new view
that helps team members clients and admin know yeah maybe billing clarity
could be yeah maybe that gives team members clients in a like let's say
clarity on monthly billing or something like that but I don't know saying the
because I think you kind of brought it as a side that like hey like let's break
away from monthly and like you have a project maybe it starts mid month and
ends like mid month the next month you know and then we can do billing on that
I think maybe it could be relevant to bring that in to this framing because
that that could solve potentially a lot of like issues of like you know maybe
we're doing a project that's like the last two weeks of the month and it kind
of drags on into like the first week of the next month and it's like really
complicated so it might like touch to the root of the confusion and a
difficulty for the admin yeah it's at the it's at the project level because
right now like I mean and this sort of problem the other thing I saw that Ryan
did was this other little thing just called context right it's not really a
problem it's just what it is like currently like you know everyone you
know pays and is paid monthly like so you know not not by the project I mean
it's by the project but not I'll say the project timeline that's not when the
project gets done like when that gets done and in the month you know and then
it's the end of that month after the works been completed so it's not
necessarily a problem it's just what it is right now and yeah so that and we do
we do to make us go fast we do want to let it's not so much like the other
little piece here is you may have multi-level clients relations like
Corbett's meeting with someone on their team who can make a comp like a decision
but a lot of times they'll make that call and then the person who's actually
writing the check or paying the bills on that is a different person and so we have
to call to communicate back on their side as well that hey I know you paid
for X but actually you're gonna get Y and that's because you're a person on
your team said this at this stage or something like that so it's it's on our
side right this week you know yeah because if they change yeah I think
what's also confusing is clients are purchasing weeks in advance that
actually is making it quite complicated and sometimes without like you know
projects assigned does that make sense like they're actually just sometimes
they're buying four weeks and we're like I'll put it to this or that and then we
get into it and you're like we change it the moment this is really happening very
particularly with one specific client project escrow yeah yeah we could do
that could be an escrow thing but I'm wondering if it's like like it's a
little bit more firm like hey when you prove the project we link the approval
and the payment and everything down to that and that locks that project in for
that one like two-week project we do the two weeks and then when it's done it
kind of cleans out and you have single project in we do project project goes
out next project comes in or if there's two people working in parallel like we
have that right now for one client where like Keith's working on one project
Liam's working on another project Lucian's working on another project all
for the same client in the same month but each person only has one project
for that client, if that makes sense.
They're not overlapping multiple projects.
You know, it's like we make a nice, perfect system
where they all line up beautifully month to month,
and this doesn't actually happen this way.
Because also we have projects like this one.
It says November, but this one just got finished now,
you know, mid-December.
This one with the content attachments,
like still, we have some stuff still working on.
Yeah, and again, this is in a, like,
but this is good, because like now we're kind of working
not only past the timeline, I don't really,
I'm not worried about this,
and I'm not picking on you, Keith,
because we're in an unhealthy, unsafe team.
We'd be like, come on, Keith, what's going on?
Why aren't you getting your stuff done?
Actually, it's like, wow, we missed it on the framing.
Like maybe this was, we actually tried to do two projects
in one.
Yeah, it was a good lesson.
Yeah, I mean, this is, and for us too,
this is not on you, we're doing this together.
So we put two different projects
that are kind of related, but not really.
At the time they felt related, but they weren't really,
and we put them in this kind of a pretty tight budget.
Two weeks is tight.
One is insanely small.
So we need to have more margin here,
because now we're actually about to tap into a third week,
which is not, and again, the budget here is mostly
just to track how much effort it was.
And some of us should be more like,
our estimated effort is accurate or inaccurate.
So this could be like a conversation,
we could figure out how this happened.
But in this case, like this was done in November,
it was paid for on December 1st,
and yet it's still kind of in review.
And this may be totally done, I'm just picking on this,
because it's, it's so close.
Yeah, it wasn't quite as clean as like,
oh, and last day of November, it's off and there it goes.
And then like December 1st starts
and we start a new project.
It's never quite that clean.
That never happens.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's good to set your target as best as you can.
Things happen, but.
And then another piece of content for the context piece,
like some projects is like, if it goes a bit over,
like in the timeline, it's okay.
Like the client's not gonna be too worried.
Other projects, like there's actually like, I don't know,
like a live challenge happening or something like that.
Some urgency.
Yeah.
Well, and this is somewhat helpful,
but we kind of just tend to time box these things to a month.
Let me see if, so like this still has,
and this is where like, you're still, I know,
I'm picking on this because I saw a PR come through
like last night.
So technically this is like somewhere out here,
even if it is finished, it's still,
there was something happened to it, you know,
but that's helpful to know.
Cause I could come to Keith, like Keith,
where are we at with this thing?
And he's like, well,
I haven't even finished the first thing, right?
This little visual, if we can get it right.
So like in theory, we've got a four week project
starting now, which really puts us like somewhere mid,
you know, January, because that's really helpful to know.
And when we're, and again, I'm not,
we're not trying to like, I'm not picking on Keith or us.
It's like, we have to just show the client, like,
Hey, the thing we were trying to build you here
took a little longer, or we ran into some issues,
whatever they are, something happened.
So this got pushed,
cause now we need to reset expectations.
Much better to tell them on the December 16th
that there's coming on the mid January,
then like at the last day of December,
like remember how we thought you were getting it
last day of December?
Actually it's another two weeks.
Like that's way worse than just kind of getting it.
On that note, I guess just cause we're talking about it,
in some ways it's actually kind of good and non-blocking
to have a slight overlap like these two had,
because kind of we're at the end of this,
the multi-language tracks, you know, process.
And it's kind of me and Lucien kind of iterating,
just making sure every last little edge case
is taken care of.
And that's kind of back and forth.
I know Lucien's obviously really busy.
So when there's ever time, you know, downtime on that,
I can just move right along to, so I've, you know,
I've gotten a significant amount of work done
on the profile page builder as well,
just kind of in between, you know, whatever gaps,
natural gaps arise,
but not that that's the way we should be doing it.
It's just, it kind of works out for me at least.
No, that's great.
That's a good observation because there's kind of like
work you're done with it.
And the other thing is Lucien's getting feedback,
but it also could be client feedback.
You know, they may ask requests to change,
they may find a bug.
So there's kind of like this tail of the project
where like, you can't really be on it full time.
Cause we're waiting,
there's some delays and you waiting for stuff.
So that, that makes sense.
But.
Yeah, whereas like the front, the front end of the,
well, not the biggest, not the front end.
is about like the front side of the project is more long kind of hours of not iterating
with someone else right where it's and so it kind of it pairs kind of nicely with the back end of
one or back half of one process is kind of a little more stop and start and communication
and the front half of another process is a lot more dev heavy and so the two kind of
can work in tandem okay you know maybe it's not always ideal to have projects run over time and
before you start the next one but it works out in some way yeah i don't even know how to capture
that but i'll just say like there's sort of like two modes this is just again context not a problem
no need to change it just what it is is that you kind of go and we're either interview you know
internally or with with a client and that part is just kind of you going in doing a couple hours
kicking it back to them them checking stuff signing off on it again so
um i think this is good i don't know where we land if we um
okay so what do you guys think we have about 15 more minutes i don't know if we're it feels like
we got a couple things and we're and the only problem with this being the first problem problem
and this happens with clients as well is um this is our first project together so we're like kind
of want to bring all the problems that we have at the top of mind right now like and all the ideas
at once so it does take a little bit of so we may may just duplicate this to the side i don't know
if uh we were already doing that but um we could this could be one project where this is a view
that does this and if we did that we may pull like this record stuff and the log stuff out
there's a view some way to reset priority maybe there's a way to just
make a note i don't know maybe this is not the worst thing we could pull the note
yeah we could pull this out what is a way to reset priority
it's not something yeah that's a good um
um it's almost like redistribute um the budget for the bottom i don't know how we do that other
than this has happened recently where we clients be like hey pull take push this project out and
pull that week in and um again that made it we also don't want to create an entire software
solution for something that's really like a process problem you know we may have a sloppy
process there where we are letting people change it or maybe they shouldn't approve the project
for the beginning of the month until it's like allocated or we shouldn't assign allocate the
budget yet um i don't know yeah i was gonna jump into this because you know the like calendar view
with like the i don't know what it's called the flow charts like you have like the bar
goes across a month or whatever uh it's good but we don't see like the um you know the candidate
projects like or you know the projects in escrow or whatever that we're considering like looking at
every person like oh you have like a slot like who's available next it feels like it's kind of
underutilized um yeah it's not a fully formed idea but just
yeah like visibility in like future uh projects feels like could be could be better
yeah you're like we're seeing it by month right now but that's not really it's kind of like
um again this is quickly it may be like um something where it's like
um ideas and you know um now and there's just like you know we've got a bunch of ideas here
of things we could do and this is actually what's like we're working on right now
kind of idea you know just kind of have two lists um i know that um
actually i don't know if you guys have seen the fizzy stuff if you've played with it
but they have this very simple like idea of like moving something to like not now or next
or like something they're considering or done like you can kind of make up whatever columns you want
but um it may be because right now what we've got is like november and it's like the official
thing for november december the official you know there's there's actually not a 3d the green
was in another dimension here where um you know we kind of have it here like this is
framing so it's not and that we have the like this is paid paid paid paid um this is estimate
like we're still kind of thinking about this i think this is
Super simple thing would be just to like have the view that you have like in your
dashboard, like each team member, you know, has like, I don't know, working on
this in December, working on blah, blah, blah, like with the specific dates, not
just like, like a column per month.
Um, but having that, like just filtered, like by clients.
So they're seeing like, okay, you have like three team members working on.
Something this guy's working from mid January to like, end of January, like
like this, but like for the client and that wouldn't really require us to like
do anything in the, in over dashboard, it can just be like a new, uh, view and
notion.
So kind of like, you're saying like turn this, uh, uh, you do subgroup Bruce, so
you could buy a team member or yeah.
So you have it as a board and then you can group it by, if you want to say, Hey,
what's Lucian working on?
Right.
Well, here are the ones that are, you know, you do that or the status property.
Yeah.
And you were saying group by status or by the billing status.
Uh, if you go to subgroup, so, uh, you don't have it in this view.
I was saying that if we group it by, um, billing status though, that's probably
the most useful billing.
So, um, Oh, what's the month though?
What data are we using?
So building it out drafts just to, um, invoice date.
Oh no, it's going to be the actual work dates.
Yep.
I'm with you.
Um, what is this?
Okay.
So you're saying something like this, where it's like, Hey, there's a bunch
of stuff in the estimate like this, but then we also have paid or is paid.
It's a little, little goofy how it's set up here.
So this is paid.
I think the problem is I need to hide all of the let's go.
Oh, we don't have, anyway, I'll play with it.
Um, or it's like filter out those that are older than six months, you know,
cause you still want to want to see like what happened.
Yes.
You need a filter for sure.
Filter like dates.
You could actually filter this one by the dates, like, um, the past, like year.
I don't know, but yes, I see what, basically we could do that.
And this is a good point because one of the, we just said like, these
are the problems and then outcome.
Like no one said we had to code a brand new view in a dashboard.
Like maybe the dashboard view is in notion.
So we want to have a lot of flexibility here.
To go fix this thing without necessarily having to, you
know, do as little code as possible.
Yeah, that, that could be good.
I know we're coming up on the time.
So what might be good is, um, keep the frame of like, Hey, there's something
here if we went ahead and like did the breadboard next, uh, I won't do it right
now, but, um, what we would do is basically map out the current view of like, how does
this currently get done, which would be excruciatingly pay painful.
Um, because it's going to be like, um, a meeting takes place.
This person makes a decision.
This person tells, adds a comment to notion and changes it in notion.
Notion, you know, maybe notifies Macy and we kind of see everything.
Cause the other thing that's also at our disposal is the, um,
automations here in, in, uh, notion.
So maybe like, Hey, if, if a week gets moved or budget changes, it
should notify Macy, for example.
Like every time someone changes from two weeks to three weeks, like that
should send an alert, um, some kind of, and ideally like it could even
send an alert inside our shared Slack channel with the client to like,
they see it, we see it, you know, kind of something simple.
So yeah, we can play with this.
Lucian.
I like the idea of it just being in notion.
Definitely good.
Um, I think to get clarity on this would be great if we, um, just go through and
like the next piece would be to kind of map out the current workflow of this
using kind of the breadboard, and then we can look at what an easier way might be.
Um, because just in looking at how bad the current one is, we may see some
quick connections, like, Oh, if we just link, uh, someone changing the budget
to that notification, it kind of solves this outcome we were shooting for here
with, with notifications, for example, or, um, I don't know.
And I feel like the kind of framing on the problem side, it's still, it feels
like not crispy enough because we have filling, but
got it started. And this is it. I was hoping we would land on like, cool, let's go like, let's go
breadboard it next. But there's definitely a lot more to talk about. And I think probably what
we've done is we've picked too many problems to solve. Like this is the single point of truth is
important. Priority shifting. And I think this also is more of like a context thing.
A problem of not clear when, so this is more of the billing sort of billing problem here.
It's actually all billing related, not knowing which projects are paid for. Okay. So this is
kind of the same, these two are sort of grouped. It's like billing and scheduling or like assigning,
you know, but I don't know. Is that really a problem that we have a lot that's like,
oh, we assigned someone, but they were actually already busy on something. Does that happen?
No, but we would probably use something like the other view here, you know, to like
see this, but it's not also, I mean, I can kind of see what you're working on.
The problem is that if something doesn't, for some reason, get assigned to you here,
this data could be bad. It's not quite as like digital where like person's paid for it. It's
showing up in here. You know, we've got some stuff that's in review. I guess, I don't know.
Another thing that happens that's kind of related, but I don't think
kind of has been explicitly stated is keeping track of our own capacity and making sure that
we're able to hit our capacity. Yeah. It'd be good if like, that's a great question. So like,
so like just, I'll just say clarity between team, like an admin on,
you know, if Iris says like, cool, December, you know, I want to take, I want to do five weeks
instead of four, or if someone's traveling and they only want to do two weeks in a month, like
that's helpful to know. It's kind of related here, but to me, I would see it as like, if we had,
you know, some view where it was like each of the months written out and I could see like,
Ira wants three, you know, and he's got, you know, we've got like his little three
blocks here. Right. And I can see that he's like assigned two weeks right now. It can be a simple
view like that. And here's this project, here's this project, and here's this project. And maybe
it's, you know, I don't know, something like this where we could see specific things in this month.
We want five weeks. There's like a little something here, you know, and then not only that we can see
like, Hey, it's going to be like this dollar amount here, this dollar amount here. And this
is sort of, if this is sort of active and then we have sort of a like past, you know, going back
this way, you can see like, Oh, in, you know, this month we made this much money in this month. I made
this much money. And then maybe a total as well for the year, that could be cool. Like, what do
you want to make for the year? This is sort of just, you know, kind of what I was had in mind
with something like a view like this. And then things could be moved because this is a real
example because, so one context thing we're getting very clear is that the client billing
and the like team member, we'll just say money is very closely linked, right? Like they make,
client says, Oh, let's push this project from January to December to January. Well, now like
we had four weeks assigned to IRA, but now we just kicked one of them a month in it for it.
So now he actually has, it actually like opened up a week. And so now he's actually like getting
affected by that negatively for whatever reason, like, this is just stuff that happens. So
it'd be good if, if, if I see that, or Macy sees that, and we're trying to like,
keep you guys, you know, full and not, not over committed, but also not under committed.
So good. Well, it seems a little, a little more clear, but it probably needs another session.
I think one thing, like if I had to give it a score right now, we're probably 40, 50% on the
framing, you know, clarity, it's, it's not there yet. We probably got the, you know, this, another
session like this would maybe get it to the finish line, but part of it is also just picking
one single point. And I think the, the billing piece would be good. And now, you know, at this
point, it's probably clear enough to go do the breadboarding.
and actually breadboard out how does a client currently tell us their budget for the month.
And it's going to be messy, but it's like, oh, they emailed us this, then they had this
conversation over here. We tried to add an appetite here. Because what's missing in this view
is there's no committed amounts. We don't know that they committed.
The client's actually wanting to spend in the same exact way I drew this for here.
The clients are like, hey, I want to spend three weeks. Hey, I want to spend four weeks.
They actually have this, but in reverse. It's actually the same view.
And so if we say the appetite, and not only that, what's extremely confusing for clients
is the week's thing. I mean, I know it makes sense to us and we kind of live with it. But
they're like, what does a week cost again? The amount of people who have been working
on this for four or five years and don't know what a week, it's never changed. But just like,
I'll just say client expectations on cost and week's budget or something.
Maybe it could just be our language. Instead of saying appetite is one week,
is appetite is $1 sign or $2 sign. $4 sign is like four weeks, what we used to call four weeks.
Yeah, that's true. But if they sat here and they could see the dollar sign up here with the three
weeks, you put a dollar sign next to something, people get real clear real fast.
I actually really, really like the dollar signs because the software engineering,
there's just kind of this perverse incentive of if it takes me longer, I get a little bit more money.
But if I'm really sharp and knock it out, but framing it as dollar signs, I feel like that
gives me the psychological freedom of, okay, I'm going to knock out this $4 sign thing in two weeks
and without the client. I mean, because it's one thing we can't do in Notion,
but we can do here is we just put the actual dollar. Is that $5,000? Is it 2,000? Because
to me, that's super motivating. We don't want to be too abstract because we can,
but yeah, if you see a four week thing and you see like, cool, I'm going to have an awesome December,
but I got to do five weeks of stuff. It's a little more motivating if there's like,
hey, I'm going to make X dollars with a real dollar sign there. And I think the clients
as well, it just makes it real clear because we kind of kept it vague because in Notion,
we're moving it along. And a lot of times, even their team, they're kind of spending in weeks,
but maybe they don't know the dollar amounts. Like we have some clients where they're making
budget decisions, but not dollar budget decisions. I don't know, but this could be useful.
So, okay, sweet. The other thing we're trying to do is like when clients do come to us and they
pick out like multi-month plan, like I want to spend this over the next six months, like then,
of course, we help them with some discounts and a few other things. So those numbers could change
potentially, but it incentivizes more consistent, hey, let's work together for six months. So now,
like each of the team members on there have a plan for the next six months. They're not
wondering if we're going to have work the next month. So, okay. I think it's getting clear.
Maybe this is it. Maybe it is the team members, clients, and admin clarity on
billing and schedule. I don't know if you guys feel about that or if we could
refine it, but it's probably something in this zone. I don't know. I can try to breadboard it
and I'll maybe tag you guys in it. You can definitely check on it here, but we probably
need to breadboard the current and then maybe what the future version looks like. And this might be
useful either for like a little prototype like this, but the thing we can do is we can screenshot
this. We can go to V0 and do a super quick mock-up to just look at and then throw away.
That's what designs are for, just to see the idea. Because once we see it, you're like,
okay, it's a view. When Ira sees it, he can insert what his capacity is for the month,
but then it's also relative to what's actually happening. Because I think if you guys saw that,
that could be like your one single view you kind of start from. And if you clicked on that project,
maybe then it kicks you into Notion or then it kicks you into the task grid or then whatever
from there. It's kind of like a central hub. That's what I would be looking at every day,
a couple of times a day. Yeah. I just want to highlight again, because it's just my instinct
is telling me that that thing we brought up of switching from monthly billing to per project
billing could be like a paradigm shift that might make a lot of these issues obsolete.
Just want to highlight this. It's true. Yeah. It could still...
It just means that the months are not organized by the...
invoice dates in the project that just be working up by the work date, essentially.
So we actually have this distinction in another view that I always like to see it on the invoice dates,
but Macy likes to see it based on the cash flow, like what actually happened, because those are two different views.
So I don't think that would be a hard switch to make.
It still would be helpful to group it in 12 segments for the year, or else it's just like a little overwhelming.
But it could still say, hey, my goal in December is to make this much,
then it could just be based on the work weeks or when it gets paid.
I don't know, we can figure that out.
There's probably another field called team member date paid.
There's probably another one.
There's client date paid, then team member date paid.
These are things we should add after this call.
I think we should add that to Notion for Macy, because she knows,
and she actually has a payment database that she links to the project.
So it's kind of working that way, but we could add just a simple set of billing.
I think we call it invoice dates.
We could call it client date, or maybe there's an invoice date at client date paid,
which is a separate one than a team member date paid.
Just add that.
It should help a little bit.
Like I said, we may end up with a new Notion board when we're done with this.
So that's it.
Okay, guys, I know we went an hour, so let everybody just have a good session.