Looking for feedback 🧐

Mike van der Valk

Hi all,

We're getting closer!
Due to various reasons we haven't yet started development of a project management solution, but currently myself (Product manager) and my teammate (Engineer) are prepping the work so we can soon expand the team and start building. 

To get some early feedback from you all, we made a really quick first prototype that we'd like to share with you. Please open it and put it on present mode. You can find it by clicking on the link here 🚀 (we're not designers but we hope the direction is clear)

Please comment on this post with your feedback and let us know:

1. What are your first thoughts after seeing this?
2. What you would expect to be able to do inside the new projects area?
3. What would be the main value for you if we launch a project management solution?
4. What direction feels more natural to you: 
   - Converting a deal into a project 
   - Closing the deal and creating a new project linked to that deal
5. Any other feedback you might have, please let us know

Please be honest and don't be afraid to hurt our feelings. With honest and well written answers we can make sure that eventually we'll build the best solution for you and your team!

ilter pak

Unbelievable Looks great.

 

1. What are your first thoughts after seeing this?
   
    Looks great
    
2. What you would expect to be able to do inside the new projects area?
   
   Sales or purchasing process follow-up. Task tracking. Integration with the technical team
    
3. What would be the main value for you if we launch a project management solution?
   
   More collaboration. Accurate process tracking and reporting
    
4. What direction feels more natural to you: 
   - Converting a deal into a project 
   - Closing the deal and creating a new project linked to that deal
   
   Actually it can be both
   But the overall process is the project after the sale.
    
5. Any other feedback you might have, please let us know
   
   Only the last part, the calendar part, this part could be clearer

Kristi Humphrey

Initially, this is more complicated than I am seeking. For our purposes, we need the ability to make a simple checklist that resides "pinned" at the top of each deal to keep track of completed tasks and paperwork. I would prefer the checklist to be inside the deal interface so that at a moment's notice any team member can open and see the progress and needed next steps. 

Tom Chapman

Hi - great to see some progress here.

 

1.) Initial thoughts are that it seems simple to use.

2.) would expect to be able to see live and completed projects here, and utilise the contextual view to update, move projects along a stage.

3.) the main value for us is to reduce double keying data so it would be essential that deal titles, values, the relevant contacts etc all auto populate when creating a project.

4.) definitely closing the deal first, which then auto creates a new project (or at least give users the option of this happening). users should be able to access the project from within the deal, organisation or contact views (so it is easy to see what the historical/live projects are) and in the projects list.

Florent_29381

Hi Mike,

 

1. Looks well integrated into the current platform and available functionalities. Would seem quite 'familiar' right away.
2. What we've been doing so far (or have attempted to do) is to create a new Pipeline that we call 'delivery' so when a deal is in we move it to the delivery pipeline where we have different stages like you have the activity list (e.g. assembly etc). So even though the project-functionalities you've designed so far are not technically in there yet, we are able to achieve quite a lot of those outcomes on a high-level (e.g. team members can track projects, see the stage it is in, etcetera)
3. The interesting part of us is if we can use it not only as an internal project management solution, but also as an external delivery tool. Meaning, like I said above a lot of the project management we can somewhat already tackle, but what's interesting is if I could keep the contact person (customer) linked to this deal/project in the loop on delivery. 
4. Converting a deal into a project. Seems more natural. A project sold turns into a project implemented right away - no steps or hassle in between.
5. Continuing on point 3, just some thoughts. Let's say that I can share a project link with my customer like I can already share an insights dashboard externally within Pipedrive (existing functionality). A customer would have real-time insight into project delivery. I could even leave a DHL link for example into the project for the customer to view as soon as it hits 'transport' stage. So rather than me sending 10 emails to a customer to keep them up-to-date, the customer could get a notification 'your project has been moved to the assembly stage' (or something like that). The status-update tool that's already there to chat with the team internally would be a tool for a customer to leave questions or directly ask questions about their project if they'd like. Existing functionalities like email/quotation templates could be repurposed to keep customers in the loop on the delivery of the goods/services they bought. I feel like a standard project management solution (internally oriented) people either already have a solution for (whether they are going old-school with Excel or something or using something like Asana) or with some creativity they could already achieve (partially) within Pipedrive like mentioned above. So the real 'value-add' part for us is when we can use it for delivery towards our customers. There are complicated tools out there that can do it, but I feel that within Pipedrive it'd be very easily achievable and I think it would offer a lot of value to Pipedrive's customers (at least for us).

 

So in short, my honest feedback: this is great, but I'd think even bigger  

Bert Calatz

Hi Mike,

1. Overall and what you can get out of the presentation it looks fine.
    
2. Within the project module you expect things like being able to collaborate with multiple people. Both internally and externally. Tracking and executing various tasks and activities. It would be logical if budget control and time control were integrated.
    
3. Integration within the application. No need to re-enter things.
    
4. Conversion from a deal to a project seems the most logical. However, if you close the deal and can open a project with the necessary information from the previous deal, this can also work well. Larger organizations that work with separate departments such as sales and project management will probably opt for that, while smaller organizations can simply opt for the conversion from a deal to project. What's important is that the data transfer is smooth. If you work with products in the deal phase and base your price on that, you will want to include this data in your project.

Rui Araújo

Thank you for the work you have been doing. It is exactly this type of tool that both my team and I need to be able to be more efficient in our daily work.

 

1. It has a very similar format to a solution that we are already using, pairing Pipedrive with another project management application. The user experience seems extremely familiar 
2.  
   1. Being able to segment projects into different categories
   2. Open tasks and subtasks,
   3. Allocating people to tasks and subtasks,
3.  Having my team working on a single platform, increasing efficiency, improving communication decreasing mistakes and backlog.
4. For my organization both solutions are necessary, but in the event that I have to choose one, 90% of the new projects we start are after a deal is completed.
5.  
   1. Are the annexes present in the "deal" stage still available in the "project" stage?
   2. Is it possible to edit the project's "pipeline"?
   3. Is it possible to create a "guest" profile for a specific business/project? The idea would  be to involve our customers by giving them access to the deal /project where they effectively are stakeholders. This would promote a collaborative partnerahip in both sales and development. In both steps there are always inputs and information that we need to receive and gather from our customers. Therefore, this kind of solution would help by bringing Customer/Sales/Projet Team closer together.  This solution is a bit like what "Accord" already is putting in place. .

Jeff Farrick

1. Looks cool and useful if it functions well.
2. I would expect to be able to pull insights on things like "average duration in X Stage", "When (custom field [tracking number]) is filled, send confirmation email to contact",  etc
3. Not needing to use Monday.com, however our team has already invested HEAVILY into Monday.com as a project management / tracking / task board
4. Always close the deal, unless after you convert it to a project you can still pull information from the deal in your insights / custom filters, otherwise you are losing your closing data 
5. If this really gets built out, I believe you should focus on integrations & apps. 90% of the time, we just need a place to host information and track progress through a pipeline to initiate automated triggers. The actual work of invoicing, payment processing, shipping, and training, all happen with external tools. We historically just need a place to bring it all home.

Adam Turl

Hi Mike - this looks great, and is exactly what we need (we currently just have a seperate Pipeline for delivery)

 

1. What are your first thoughts after seeing this? - Love it - a great start
2. What you would expect to be able to do inside the new projects area? - As others have said, manage tasks, sub tasks, assign tasks (internally and externally) etc. Also ability to paste images direct from the clipboard would be excellent
3. What would be the main value for you if we launch a project management solution? - We deliver IT solutions, so keeping on top of multiple deliveries, and for the customer to be able to see progress
4. What direction feels more natural to you: - In order to price our services and define our resourcing needs, we will normally create a project plan as part of the sales processes. With this in mind the ability to link a Project Plan to an Open deal would be very useful.
   - Converting a deal into a project 
   - Closing the deal and creating a new project linked to that deal
5. Any other feedback you might have, please let us know. As mentioned above, we base our quotes on an initial estimate of what the plan would look like. If we could have the ability to put a cost and resources (both internal and external) against each plan item, we can then build a quote more easily (this data would not be shared with the customer). In addition the ability to view multiple projects at the same time (across all clients), so that we can see where we might have resources issues.

Courtney_34227

Hi Mike, 

Happy to see things moving along here. 

1. What are your first thoughts after seeing this? It seems very intuitive, would be easy to train my team on using It as most of them are familiar with Pipedrive already.
2. What you would expect to be able to do inside the new projects area? I expect to be able to track tasks and subtasks in different stages (i.e. In Progress, For Review, Complete), group projects together by category, add documents and notes to a project, assign certain people to projects (creating a project team) then assign tasks to those on the team, and add due dates to each task. 
3. What would be the main value for you if we launch a project management solution? The biggest value for us is to have everything in one system. 
4. What direction feels more natural to you: 
   - Converting a deal into a project 
   - Closing the deal and creating a new project linked to that deal For us, we would need both but we would also need to be able to associate a project with an open deal.
5. Any other feedback you might have, please let us know. Some things now that I appreciate from our current PM system is that every time a task is created, edited, complete, etc.. I have the option to notify those associated with it. Whether It is one person or many people, I can leave a comment on the task itself and notify everyone or if someone finishes a task assigned to them, they can mark It as complete and I would be notified of that. It has saved us from several status meetings since we can be notified in real time if things are getting done or if there are questions/comments on certain tasks.

Mike van der Valk

ilter pak said:

Unbelievable Looks great.

 

1. What are your first thoughts after seeing this?
   
    Looks great
    
2. What you would expect to be able to do inside the new projects area?
   
   Sales or purchasing process follow-up. Task tracking. Integration with the technical team
    
3. What would be the main value for you if we launch a project management solution?
   
   More collaboration. Accurate process tracking and reporting
    
4. What direction feels more natural to you: 
   - Converting a deal into a project 
   - Closing the deal and creating a new project linked to that deal
   
   Actually it can be both
   But the overall process is the project after the sale.
    
5. Any other feedback you might have, please let us know
   
   Only the last part, the calendar part, this part could be clearer

Thanks for the feedback @ilter pak could you clarify your last comment a bit. What was unclear on the calendar part?

Mike van der Valk

Kristi Humphrey said:

Initially, this is more complicated than I am seeking. For our purposes, we need the ability to make a simple checklist that resides "pinned" at the top of each deal to keep track of completed tasks and paperwork. I would prefer the checklist to be inside the deal interface so that at a moment's notice any team member can open and see the progress and needed next steps. 

So more or less a "checklist type" of activity similar to other types available now @Kristi Humphrey ?

Mike van der Valk

Florent said:

Hi Mike,

 

1. Looks well integrated into the current platform and available functionalities. Would seem quite 'familiar' right away.
2. What we've been doing so far (or have attempted to do) is to create a new Pipeline that we call 'delivery' so when a deal is in we move it to the delivery pipeline where we have different stages like you have the activity list (e.g. assembly etc). So even though the project-functionalities you've designed so far are not technically in there yet, we are able to achieve quite a lot of those outcomes on a high-level (e.g. team members can track projects, see the stage it is in, etcetera)
3. The interesting part of us is if we can use it not only as an internal project management solution, but also as an external delivery tool. Meaning, like I said above a lot of the project management we can somewhat already tackle, but what's interesting is if I could keep the contact person (customer) linked to this deal/project in the loop on delivery. 
4. Converting a deal into a project. Seems more natural. A project sold turns into a project implemented right away - no steps or hassle in between.
5. Continuing on point 3, just some thoughts. Let's say that I can share a project link with my customer like I can already share an insights dashboard externally within Pipedrive (existing functionality). A customer would have real-time insight into project delivery. I could even leave a DHL link for example into the project for the customer to view as soon as it hits 'transport' stage. So rather than me sending 10 emails to a customer to keep them up-to-date, the customer could get a notification 'your project has been moved to the assembly stage' (or something like that). The status-update tool that's already there to chat with the team internally would be a tool for a customer to leave questions or directly ask questions about their project if they'd like. Existing functionalities like email/quotation templates could be repurposed to keep customers in the loop on the delivery of the goods/services they bought. I feel like a standard project management solution (internally oriented) people either already have a solution for (whether they are going old-school with Excel or something or using something like Asana) or with some creativity they could already achieve (partially) within Pipedrive like mentioned above. So the real 'value-add' part for us is when we can use it for delivery towards our customers. There are complicated tools out there that can do it, but I feel that within Pipedrive it'd be very easily achievable and I think it would offer a lot of value to Pipedrive's customers (at least for us).

 

So in short, my honest feedback: this is great, but I'd think even bigger  

Gotcha so collaboration and sharing with the external stakeholder sticks out for you. Thanks for taking the time to share @Florent we appreciate it!

Mike van der Valk

Rui Araújo said:

Thank you for the work you have been doing. It is exactly this type of tool that both my team and I need to be able to be more efficient in our daily work.

 

1. It has a very similar format to a solution that we are already using, pairing Pipedrive with another project management application. The user experience seems extremely familiar 
2.  
   1. Being able to segment projects into different categories
   2. Open tasks and subtasks,
   3. Allocating people to tasks and subtasks,
3.  Having my team working on a single platform, increasing efficiency, improving communication decreasing mistakes and backlog.
4. For my organization both solutions are necessary, but in the event that I have to choose one, 90% of the new projects we start are after a deal is completed.
5.  
   1. Are the annexes present in the "deal" stage still available in the "project" stage?
   2. Is it possible to edit the project's "pipeline"?
   3. Is it possible to create a "guest" profile for a specific business/project? The idea would  be to involve our customers by giving them access to the deal /project where they effectively are stakeholders. This would promote a collaborative partnerahip in both sales and development. In both steps there are always inputs and information that we need to receive and gather from our customers. Therefore, this kind of solution would help by bringing Customer/Sales/Projet Team closer together.  This solution is a bit like what "Accord" already is putting in place. .

Hi @Rui Araújo 

Thanks for sharing.

1. Can you explain what you mean by "annexes"?
2. Yes, similar to pipelines for deals  
3. We've gotten many feedback about the ability to share with external stakeholders and collaborate with them. We'll definitely discuss this internally, thanks!

Mike van der Valk

Jeff Farrick said:

1. Looks cool and useful if it functions well.
2. I would expect to be able to pull insights on things like "average duration in X Stage", "When (custom field [tracking number]) is filled, send confirmation email to contact",  etc
3. Not needing to use Monday.com, however our team has already invested HEAVILY into Monday.com as a project management / tracking / task board
4. Always close the deal, unless after you convert it to a project you can still pull information from the deal in your insights / custom filters, otherwise you are losing your closing data 
5. If this really gets built out, I believe you should focus on integrations & apps. 90% of the time, we just need a place to host information and track progress through a pipeline to initiate automated triggers. The actual work of invoicing, payment processing, shipping, and training, all happen with external tools. We historically just need a place to bring it all home.

Gotcha @Jeff Farrick, thanks for sharing!

Just curious, what needs to happen for your team to say it's worth to move from Monday.com to Pipedrive for project management? Don't get me wrong we can't build the next Monday.com in a few months, it's a great tool but curious what's key for you and your team?

Mike van der Valk

Courtney said:

Hi Mike, 

Happy to see things moving along here. 

1. What are your first thoughts after seeing this? It seems very intuitive, would be easy to train my team on using It as most of them are familiar with Pipedrive already.
2. What you would expect to be able to do inside the new projects area? I expect to be able to track tasks and subtasks in different stages (i.e. In Progress, For Review, Complete), group projects together by category, add documents and notes to a project, assign certain people to projects (creating a project team) then assign tasks to those on the team, and add due dates to each task. 
3. What would be the main value for you if we launch a project management solution? The biggest value for us is to have everything in one system. 
4. What direction feels more natural to you: 
   - Converting a deal into a project 
   - Closing the deal and creating a new project linked to that deal For us, we would need both but we would also need to be able to associate a project with an open deal.
5. Any other feedback you might have, please let us know. Some things now that I appreciate from our current PM system is that every time a task is created, edited, complete, etc.. I have the option to notify those associated with it. Whether It is one person or many people, I can leave a comment on the task itself and notify everyone or if someone finishes a task assigned to them, they can mark It as complete and I would be notified of that. It has saved us from several status meetings since we can be notified in real time if things are getting done or if there are questions/comments on certain tasks.

@Courtney gotcha, so notifications to stakeholders with every update thanks for sharing!

Mike van der Valk

@Keely Biggs @Veronica Melkonian @Alexandre Brianceau @Hossein Mohsenian @Administrator @Lala Ghahreman @Eli Glanz @Katie Moore @Mark Bryant @Alex Stueber @Felicity Nolen @Kyle Neuenschwander @Jeremy Gulley @Cassandra Wurm @Bjørn-Henning Opheim @Baptiste @Bernd Auer @Alex Casteels @Anish Patel 

Any thoughts??  

Rui Araújo

Rui Araújo said:

Thank you for the work you have been doing. It is exactly this type of tool that both my team and I need to be able to be more efficient in our daily work.

 

1. It has a very similar format to a solution that we are already using, pairing Pipedrive with another project management application. The user experience seems extremely familiar 
2.  
   1. Being able to segment projects into different categories
   2. Open tasks and subtasks,
   3. Allocating people to tasks and subtasks,
3.  Having my team working on a single platform, increasing efficiency, improving communication decreasing mistakes and backlog.
4. For my organization both solutions are necessary, but in the event that I have to choose one, 90% of the new projects we start are after a deal is completed.
5.  
   1. Are the annexes present in the "deal" stage still available in the "project" stage?
   2. Is it possible to edit the project's "pipeline"?
   3. Is it possible to create a "guest" profile for a specific business/project? The idea would  be to involve our customers by giving them access to the deal /project where they effectively are stakeholders. This would promote a collaborative partnerahip in both sales and development. In both steps there are always inputs and information that we need to receive and gather from our customers. Therefore, this kind of solution would help by bringing Customer/Sales/Projet Team closer together.  This solution is a bit like what "Accord" already is putting in place. .

1. Sorry, I meant attachements. Files that are used in the deal stage which will be usefull in the project stage (and the ability to choose which attachements move to the following stage).

As for the rest, thank you for the clarification!

Veronica Melkonian

1. What are your first thoughts after seeing this?
   Looks great Mike! Would it be possible to track delivery of specific products against the products listed in the deal? 
2. What you would expect to be able to do inside the new projects area?
3. What would be the main value for you if we launch a project management solution? Tracking delivery of products against the order.
4. What direction feels more natural to you: 
   - Converting a deal into a project definitely converting feels better!

Bjørn-Henning Opheim

Rui Araújo said:

Thank you for the work you have been doing. It is exactly this type of tool that both my team and I need to be able to be more efficient in our daily work.

 

1. It has a very similar format to a solution that we are already using, pairing Pipedrive with another project management application. The user experience seems extremely familiar 
2.  
   1. Being able to segment projects into different categories
   2. Open tasks and subtasks,
   3. Allocating people to tasks and subtasks,
3.  Having my team working on a single platform, increasing efficiency, improving communication decreasing mistakes and backlog.
4. For my organization both solutions are necessary, but in the event that I have to choose one, 90% of the new projects we start are after a deal is completed.
5.  
   1. Are the annexes present in the "deal" stage still available in the "project" stage?
   2. Is it possible to edit the project's "pipeline"?
   3. Is it possible to create a "guest" profile for a specific business/project? The idea would  be to involve our customers by giving them access to the deal /project where they effectively are stakeholders. This would promote a collaborative partnerahip in both sales and development. In both steps there are always inputs and information that we need to receive and gather from our customers. Therefore, this kind of solution would help by bringing Customer/Sales/Projet Team closer together.  This solution is a bit like what "Accord" already is putting in place. .

Take a look at how Trello uses Google Disk. Perfect! This is how I would like attachments to work in this tool also

Bjørn-Henning Opheim

Jeff Farrick said:

1. Looks cool and useful if it functions well.
2. I would expect to be able to pull insights on things like "average duration in X Stage", "When (custom field [tracking number]) is filled, send confirmation email to contact",  etc
3. Not needing to use Monday.com, however our team has already invested HEAVILY into Monday.com as a project management / tracking / task board
4. Always close the deal, unless after you convert it to a project you can still pull information from the deal in your insights / custom filters, otherwise you are losing your closing data 
5. If this really gets built out, I believe you should focus on integrations & apps. 90% of the time, we just need a place to host information and track progress through a pipeline to initiate automated triggers. The actual work of invoicing, payment processing, shipping, and training, all happen with external tools. We historically just need a place to bring it all home.

I totally agree on the integration and apps. We will always use Google as our mail/drive platform. This needs to be integrated. Also Zapier..

Jeff Farrick

Jeff Farrick said:

1. Looks cool and useful if it functions well.
2. I would expect to be able to pull insights on things like "average duration in X Stage", "When (custom field [tracking number]) is filled, send confirmation email to contact",  etc
3. Not needing to use Monday.com, however our team has already invested HEAVILY into Monday.com as a project management / tracking / task board
4. Always close the deal, unless after you convert it to a project you can still pull information from the deal in your insights / custom filters, otherwise you are losing your closing data 
5. If this really gets built out, I believe you should focus on integrations & apps. 90% of the time, we just need a place to host information and track progress through a pipeline to initiate automated triggers. The actual work of invoicing, payment processing, shipping, and training, all happen with external tools. We historically just need a place to bring it all home.

@Mike van der Valk, Monday.com has an excellent integration set and powerful logic system but what sets it apart is its ability to function as a spreadsheet and scalable diversity. It is amazingly easy for us to create and customize boards for a wide variety of functions. What makes it great for us is the ability to add custom columns, groups, automations, etc. on a per-board basis, without cluttering up other information hubs.

 

Items we desperately need right now for project management:

1. PipeDrive Products - Ability to assign UDIDs to individual units of the same product and also pull a list of ALL UDIDs across all projects or within specific projects. Our Air Monitors are all uniquely identified to properly assign them to specific locations within a project, label them and track maintenance
   1. Right now, someone is taking the order information and manually assigning UDID numbers to product inventory in Monday.com
2. Shipping integrations! I really don't know much about Fedex / UPS accounts, but I do know there is an ardent desire for an integration with these shipping tools to calculate freight on the fly, based on the products in the projects. Additionally, using the integration to trigger outbound communication with customers once something has shipped would be great
3. Our project management team often deals with change orders and small follow-up quotes for our customers, so fixing PipeDrive products with things like:
   1. Ability to reference specific products outside a table
   2. Ability to attach subscription fees to products
      1. We sell hardware coupled with a separate software agreement. There is an upfront/financed cost and a monthly recurring cost
      2. The ability to reference either of these numbers anywhere in a sales doc

examples of what we use monday.com for

1. Energy Efficiency Incentive Applications Tracking Tool
   1. When an LED Efficiency deal closes, we often need to secure a contract with the utility. I have 20 different statuses or "Stages" an application can be in, and they do not necessarily happen in the same order every time
2. Task Boards for leadership in the company. Easy to create automation for "When I add person to column Y, duplicate the item on their task board, when they mark their activity as complete, notify me to review.
3. Warranty Requests - Highly Automated, publicly shareable webform so customers can fill in and request warranties on sold products
   1. This is possible with PipeDrive but adding in the required custom fields (many which are unique to warranties) really clutters up the workspace in PipeDrive

Hossein Mohsenian_8278

Excellent stuff and sorry that I'm few hours late due to the time zone difference!

1. I like it, I was imagining something like this structure. 
2. Creating statuses, stages, notifications, HIGHLIGHTs (Notes), etc
3. Native integration with Pipedrive, integration with Xero (Accounting System)
4. Converting a deal into a project (Default trigger : Won, but we should have an option to convert the deal to a job manually maybe after certain criteria have been met upon WON)
5. Customer portal! Being able to DEFINE ROLES and PRIVILIGIES as much as possible. Imagine we are coming from a journey of LEAD then DEAL then PROJECT, so at each point certain user can access certain things. Also being able to hide fields (and not show under a job/deal but still part of it, for example we have are automating an order form creation whereby we defined 70 fields in Pipedrive which only are needed to populate that form so users should not see those 70 fields under the deal/job. Currently now way to hide)

Mike van der Valk

Jeff Farrick said:

1. Looks cool and useful if it functions well.
2. I would expect to be able to pull insights on things like "average duration in X Stage", "When (custom field [tracking number]) is filled, send confirmation email to contact",  etc
3. Not needing to use Monday.com, however our team has already invested HEAVILY into Monday.com as a project management / tracking / task board
4. Always close the deal, unless after you convert it to a project you can still pull information from the deal in your insights / custom filters, otherwise you are losing your closing data 
5. If this really gets built out, I believe you should focus on integrations & apps. 90% of the time, we just need a place to host information and track progress through a pipeline to initiate automated triggers. The actual work of invoicing, payment processing, shipping, and training, all happen with external tools. We historically just need a place to bring it all home.

Hi @Jeff Farrick thank you for your detailed answer. I will review this together with my team  

Mike van der Valk

Veronica Melkonian said:

1. What are your first thoughts after seeing this?
   Looks great Mike! Would it be possible to track delivery of specific products against the products listed in the deal? 
2. What you would expect to be able to do inside the new projects area?
3. What would be the main value for you if we launch a project management solution? Tracking delivery of products against the order.
4. What direction feels more natural to you: 
   - Converting a deal into a project definitely converting feels better!

Hi @Veronica Melkonian thanks for your answers. Regarding products could you clarify please.. do you mean that the products that you sold in the deal should be linked to the project as well? Or do you mean the deal with the products should be linked there? Or something else  

Mike van der Valk

Hossein Mohsenian said:

Excellent stuff and sorry that I'm few hours late due to the time zone difference!

1. I like it, I was imagining something like this structure. 
2. Creating statuses, stages, notifications, HIGHLIGHTs (Notes), etc
3. Native integration with Pipedrive, integration with Xero (Accounting System)
4. Converting a deal into a project (Default trigger : Won, but we should have an option to convert the deal to a job manually maybe after certain criteria have been met upon WON)
5. Customer portal! Being able to DEFINE ROLES and PRIVILIGIES as much as possible. Imagine we are coming from a journey of LEAD then DEAL then PROJECT, so at each point certain user can access certain things. Also being able to hide fields (and not show under a job/deal but still part of it, for example we have are automating an order form creation whereby we defined 70 fields in Pipedrive which only are needed to populate that form so users should not see those 70 fields under the deal/job. Currently now way to hide)

Always insightful, thanks @Hossein Mohsenian !

Erwin Cammelbeeck

Hi Mike, 

It looks promising! 

1. What are your first thoughts after seeing this? Looks good and very intuitive. I like the board interface. Just as i'am used to in Asana. 
2. What you would expect to be able to do inside the new projects area? The whole process of onboarding a client. From getting the contract signed to plan the delivery date with our consultant to the final delivery. 
3. What would be the main value for you if we launch a project management solution? The biggest value is that we keep the whole onboarding proces in Pipedrive instead of using Asana after closing a deal. So you don't have to switch between two tools and no longer have customer information devided over multiple tools. 
4. What direction feels more natural to you: 
   - Converting a deal into a project 
   - Closing the deal and creating a new project linked to that deal: I Think this is the best option. Our projectmanager has to take over and sales is already doing other stuff. 
5. Any other feedback you might have, please let us know. No

Mike van der Valk

Erwin Cammelbeeck said:

Hi Mike, 

It looks promising! 

1. What are your first thoughts after seeing this? Looks good and very intuitive. I like the board interface. Just as i'am used to in Asana. 
2. What you would expect to be able to do inside the new projects area? The whole process of onboarding a client. From getting the contract signed to plan the delivery date with our consultant to the final delivery. 
3. What would be the main value for you if we launch a project management solution? The biggest value is that we keep the whole onboarding proces in Pipedrive instead of using Asana after closing a deal. So you don't have to switch between two tools and no longer have customer information devided over multiple tools. 
4. What direction feels more natural to you: 
   - Converting a deal into a project 
   - Closing the deal and creating a new project linked to that deal: I Think this is the best option. Our projectmanager has to take over and sales is already doing other stuff. 
5. Any other feedback you might have, please let us know. No

Thanks for sharing @Erwin Cammelbeeck !

Katie Moore

1. What are your first thoughts after seeing this? This is great! As many have said, it follows the current functionality and design. I agree that it would be fairly easy to train our staff on how to navigate through.
2. What you would expect to be able to do inside the new projects area? Track status/process of products being delivered. Allowing the customer external access to send/upload any assets would really be beneficial. I have seen in other project management programs the ability for the customer or business to approve/reject different items. Having the ability to simply click "approved" or "reject" (and allow a notes box for changes) would be ideal.
3. What would be the main value for you if we launch a project management solution? Keeping everything all within PipeDrive, from sales to delivery. On average our deals could have upwards of 10-25 different products, and being able to track the progress is key. Our current "project management" is very old school in that we use Google Sheets to track products, and we are manually entering product information into these sheets. As you can imagine errors are very common, so drastically reducing the possibility of human error by having the information already in PipeDrive is HUGE.
4. What direction feels more natural to you: 
   - Converting a deal into a project 
   - Closing the deal and creating a new project linked to that deal This option would work best for us, especially if we are able to set an automation that when the deal is WON, a project is created and is focused around the products within that deal.
5. Any other feedback you might have, please let us know I really like the setup of the "project view". If this will have a strong connection with the products attached to the linked deal, I can foresee this being very beneficial and truly paramount for our company. The "Phases" would (if possible) allow us to group products by their product code rather than creating a "laundry list" of all products.

Overall, I think this addition to PipeDrive is highly needed and you and your team are off to a really great start and I can't wait to see what else is to come!

Kyle Neuenschwander

Hey Pipedrive!

The Project feature on its own would be a welcome boon and could help streamline our process. However, our business runs under a SAAS model; our product is not a single object, but a service which we provide. We do have additional offerings under our business model which help support our main product

What are your first thoughts after seeing this?

1. What you would expect to be able to do inside the new projects area?
   • Outside of what is apparent from the mockup presented, it would also be deeply advantageous to permit Workflow Automations to push projects between stages based on the completion of constituent tasks, and to permit specialized behaviour based on properties of the deal(s) with which it is associated.
2. What would be the main value for you if we launch a project management solution?
   •  Examples of how this could be used would include:
     • Tracking product feature requests by requesting clients
     • Custom versions of our product offering (such as white labels)
     • Custom use of our product by internal professionals to accomplish paid service offerings within their accounts.
3. What direction feels more natural to you: 
   1.  Converting a deal into a project 
   2.  Closing the deal and creating a new project linked to that deal
   3.  OTHER
      • Projects related to deals, but not as an exclusive 1:1 relationship. In other words, the option to manage multiple projects related to one deal, or even better, possibly related to multiple deals.
4. Any other feedback you might have, please let us know
   • While this may be out of scope, we actively leverage Pipedrive to help maintain ongoing relationships between ourselves and our Won clients; at present, many features stop functioning after a deal is 'Won', such as 'Rot' and 'Important' or 'Required' fields. While this particular feature could be immensely helpful to us, it wouldn't cover these and related needs where account management is concerned.

Mike van der Valk

Katie Moore said:

1. What are your first thoughts after seeing this? This is great! As many have said, it follows the current functionality and design. I agree that it would be fairly easy to train our staff on how to navigate through.
2. What you would expect to be able to do inside the new projects area? Track status/process of products being delivered. Allowing the customer external access to send/upload any assets would really be beneficial. I have seen in other project management programs the ability for the customer or business to approve/reject different items. Having the ability to simply click "approved" or "reject" (and allow a notes box for changes) would be ideal.
3. What would be the main value for you if we launch a project management solution? Keeping everything all within PipeDrive, from sales to delivery. On average our deals could have upwards of 10-25 different products, and being able to track the progress is key. Our current "project management" is very old school in that we use Google Sheets to track products, and we are manually entering product information into these sheets. As you can imagine errors are very common, so drastically reducing the possibility of human error by having the information already in PipeDrive is HUGE.
4. What direction feels more natural to you: 
   - Converting a deal into a project 
   - Closing the deal and creating a new project linked to that deal This option would work best for us, especially if we are able to set an automation that when the deal is WON, a project is created and is focused around the products within that deal.
5. Any other feedback you might have, please let us know I really like the setup of the "project view". If this will have a strong connection with the products attached to the linked deal, I can foresee this being very beneficial and truly paramount for our company. The "Phases" would (if possible) allow us to group products by their product code rather than creating a "laundry list" of all products.

Overall, I think this addition to PipeDrive is highly needed and you and your team are off to a really great start and I can't wait to see what else is to come!

Hi @Katie Moore we appreciate your feedback, thank you very much for sharing!