I’ve both worked in classic startup environments, where you typically work on one or two big products, and agency environments where there’s anywhere between 5 and 25 ongoing projects at any time.
I feel like enough has been written about how project management is done within startups, so I’d like to focus on this post on how we manage projects at Includable Agency.
Background
First some background: we’re a small agency based in Amsterdam, developing mobile applications for iOS and Android, as well as bespoke web applications. My colleague Dante and I both work full time on managing projects and doing some of the design and development work. We’re surrounded by a team of part-timers and contractors, made up of designers and React Native, iOS, Android and web developers. Nearly all of them work remotely.
Our customer base ranges from tiny startups to nationally known companies and several branches of Dutch government. We tend to mostly have customers that stay with us for a long time — the average duration of a customer relationship is about 3–4 years at the moment.
The tool belt
Over the years, we tried every project management tool from Basecamp to Asana, to Flow and JIRA, and everything in between. At some point we decided that Trello would be our…
