Projects Add-On: current state of things and future
An Important Message to Our Community Members
As the newly appointed product manager of the Projects feature, I wanted to take a moment to address this matter with utmost importance. Your feedback and continued support are invaluable to us, and I want to assure you that we have heard you loud and clear.
First and foremost, I want to apologize for any disappointment or frustration you may have experienced. We genuinely appreciate your trust in the Projects feature and your dedication to sticking with us during this journey. As you know, Pipedrive is primarily committed to solving the problems faced by sales teams, which led to the release of the Projects Add-On. The tool is key to solving common project management challenges but has always been used by a lot of our customers with other supporting tools like Asana or Trello, as an end-to-end project management solution.
Projects Add-On is, and will continuously be under maintenance. We will continue to address all critical bugs, but no new feature development is planned at the moment. Pipedrive, in its' essence is a Sales CRM tool for small and medium businesses, and we made a tough decision to double-down our efforts to support the Core area to ensure the best possible experience for our customers.
However, the Projects API is underway, and we aim to make it available for public use this year so you can create integrations and automations with the Projects Add-On, as well as solve current importing/exporting issues.
To ensure better transparency and communication, we will be releasing any future updates across our public channels
Thank you for your patience, support, and continued belief in us. If you have any immediate concerns or questions, please don't hesitate to respond in the thread to this discussion.
Comments
-
Sorry to hear this Vlad, we were really excited to bring our operational functions into Pipedrive as a sole repo. It really feels like you are only a couple of steps away from having the usability required to make Projects a real thing - I do hope you'll revisit this down the line.
7 -
Dear @Vlad Deripasko,
I agree with @Ashley Keeler. A couple of things are missing for the projects module to provide big value. Things like task notifications, eventually down the road an integration in the mobile app. But these should be fairly reasonable.
Our sales often comes with pre-sales projects, that need to be completed to sell a larger package, thus we value a tight integration of our project-managment with our CRM.
Being a paying customer of a feature which is incomplete and isn't being developed any further feels wrong. We have choosen to opt into projects not for what it is but for what it could become. Stopping the development will make us look for alternatives.
5 -
It's a shame.
Half the team we currently have on Pipedrive is our Customer Success team. Projects is not perfect, but the simplicity of it was a big point for us to give a try. But if no further development is going to be made, it will be difficult to stay.
We love Pipedrive, and I don't think we would consider for our Sales team to go somewhere else. But as companies grow, the need to have a tight integration between the Sales teams and Customer Success or the Support Team, becomes more important.
Hopefully in the near future Pipedrive considers again to invest in Projects. I agree with Ashely above, Projects is not missing a lot of things to be functional. Specially for the small and medium businesses you target.
5 -
@Vlad Deripasko Sadly we were in the middle of trialing Projects, now that I can see that you guys are not doing any more development, I have canceled it.
The concept of projects tied to sales is very important to give us the full sales automation platform we were looking for. Closing deals should always trigger the next stage for sales admin, post-sales, and technical staff.
Now that we have to engage yet another 3rd party plug-in, yet another platform to learn, yet another cost, makes us wonder if we made a mistake jumping over from Hubspot (which by the way has everything, granted at a much higher price).
If you are not doing any more development, why don't you at least just throw it in with the base package, let us work out our own workarounds (which we seem to have to do a lot anyway), and re-visit adding it as an add on when you guys decide to make it a priority.
Mike
4 -
@Vlad Deripasko I agree with everything @Ashley Keeler @ohlr @Roberto Coindreau and @MBrown have written.
We would love to see the following:
- Task notifications - including notifying people if a task has been updated or changed
- Project template lock down (to ensure no one can accidentally delete pre-defined steps and miss anything)
- Ability for users to 'follow' a project (like you can in deals)
- A 'Gantt' view
FYI: We were about to move to HubSpot, when we decided to trial Projects for our Customer Success team.
4 -
During the implementation for our clients, we have noticed several key areas that need immediate attention and implementation:
- Filtering of tasks should be available based on usual criteria, similar to the way it can be done for activities.
- Upon clicking a task, the detail view should be identical to that of activities. This should include options for displaying linked projects, clients, and organizations in separate tabs.
- An API should be provided to create new projects. Additionally, a webhook should be set up to trigger whenever changes are made to a project.
- The automation of tasks should be expanded to allow the addition of further tasks when a specific phase, for instance, has been reached.
@Vlad Deripasko In closing, I'd like to wish you great success. I sincerely hope that the development continues without delay, and doesn't wait until 2024. Keep up the good work!
0 -
Not developing any further but if I upgrade my plan I get it for free pop up....
1 -
Hi @MBrown , for help or information about your plan and cancelations, please get in touch with our helpful support team. They will be able to look into your account in more detail.
1 -
I think Pipedrive should consider to build up and make stronger PROJECTS in the CRM since it is a wonderful way to make stick users in the same CRM!!! Double check and think about it. Please don't create complement features that are not going to be updated with new sub-features on it!!
2 -
@Vlad Deripasko We are currently in trial and very much appreciating the simplicity of the Projects Add-On. Like others, the lack of further development is of concern.
It brings what was almost a perfect software for us to something that feels at risk of becoming a half-way solution... we will have to weigh Pipedrive more thoroughly against other providers in light of this information.
4 -
PROJECTS needs to have all the arquitecture of data that is in Deals, otherwise it is a risk complement when users get more expert in PROJECTS (like a lot of our clients!).
1 -
Please continue to develop projects!
We need it on the mobile app as well!
1 -
Projects should be a part of a great CRM.
Products section needs a lot of work. Part a CRM is for Reps to forecast sales. Pipeline and how much commission is in their pipeline. Problem...how do you track products if you have a Deal with more than one Supplier. Example...if you have a Deal that has products from one supplier for 25 Apples and another supplier that has 33 Oranges and another one that has 52 Bananas. Every supplier has different commissions, discounts and freight. How does a Rep know how much they are going to make/forecast for the end of the month or quarter or year? How do they run a report on sales to date with results from Products?
Hide Fields or Delete fields that are required by Pipedrive. We only want to see the fields we need to see. There is no reason to clutter the screen with those Pipedrive required fields.
Reports or Filters needs to be able to find Deals with Attached Files or missing them. It's a great insight to check data is entered correctly. In our situation we automatically have a PDF attached of the quote or order.
Notes Section. Why does it show emails and then it puts those with attachments in Files? All this does is clutter up Files unnecessarily and they are duplicated. If a file is important enough to be put into Pipedrive File we would just upload it. It's already in a email why duplicate this? Why isn't there a quantity on Files? Months ago there was. This would only be valuable to see if the emails stay in the Email section and not duplicated in the File section.
I could go on but that is all for now.
3 -
disappointed to read this. I am totally agree with all the points what my fellow commenters expressed
0 -
Hi.
The one main issue was that any tasks were not appearing because they were not activities.
I now run projects in a Project Pipeline as it means I can keep a handle on all the activities that I need for a sale that has gone through. The feature would have been great if the tasks had been connected to the calendar so that I could view them and be reminded of them in the same way.
I am not promoting that feature to my clients and recommending they create a Pipeline for Projects and use simple task management in that or choose another product where they could link to something else.
2 -
It's like the took the ball half way to the goal then just gave up. Two years of waiting and pursuing other products knowing that projects was coming only for it basically be discontinued. I say discontinued because it's not in a state where I could see anyone using it seriously.
3 -
Wow. Thats news ... I am here since the beta pf projects and I saw the progress ...
Stopping it now is a big throwback ... will the subscritions be cancelled and it will be a free part of pipedrive now until it will be a wanted part of piepdrive again ?
3 -
@Vlad Deripasko my suggestion is that you and your team look at the scheduling module in Service Monster and consider something along those lines. Although I can imagine projects the way it is does have it's own separate use for smaller tasks. Service Monster also has a leads and sales opportunities pipeline but in many ways I prefer pipedrive for managing my sales. activities.
0 -
Hi, could you give us any estimation, when the API will be available? Thanks!
1 -
Hello @Vlad Deripasko
do you have any timeframe for the API release ?
And why is there a product manager if it will be not a loved product :-)
THX Niels
1 -
Thank you for the question. We aim to release an open beta of Projects Public API in the second half of October. There will be an additional announcement as well.
As for the second question: there is always a product manager when there is a product :)
cc @eStefankoD
0 -
Hi @Vlad Deripasko,
thank you for your answer. This is helpful as we are in the middle of an implementation for our client, which will deepened on the API integrations.
Two extra questions:
- Will the custom field grouping be available also in Projects as it is about to in Deals?
- Not developing projects per se, but rather just implementing partcular features through Pipedrive as a whole, can we expect Custom fields per project board as in Deals? See detail here: https://community.pipedrive.com/discussion/13284/custom-fields-for-projects-missing-feature#latest
Many thanks!
David
0 -
Lot's of things were planned and then everything basically had the rug pulled out projects wise.
With the new project manager stating that no future development other than API I wouldn't plan on anything being added so if you can't make it work with what is there feature wise I'd look for another solution.
All projects essentially offers is tasks that aren't part of activities and templates.
0 -
Hello @Vlad Deripasko
will you announce here the projects API ?
is the plan still for second part of October?
thx
Niels
0 -
Hey-hey @Niels Przybilla_58340
We just released Project API in beta. More info in the announcement post: https://community.pipedrive.com/discussion/13438/introducing-projects-api-in-public-beta/p1?new=1
0 -
I don't think we're going to support custom fields grouping in the near future since we halted all the product development and decided to focus on the maintenance for the time being. I'll let you know if anything changed.
0
