Hey Digital is a B2B SaaS marketing agency specialising in generating high-quality signups and demos through effective paid advertising strategies. Hey Digital offers creative-only and fully managed paid ad services to SaaS businesses. With their fully remote, globally distributed team, Hey Digital was named Estonia’s 2nd fastest growing company in 2022.
The results described in this case study were achieved while Laura served as the Design Operations Manager at Hey Digital.
Hey Digital had ambitious plans to scale. They already had good operational foundations: Their team used ClickUp for project management and collaborated through Slack, Loom and Zoom. Many, but not all, of their routine tasks had previously been templatised using ClickUp. The team also made use of ClickUp’s time tracking functionality, though this wasn’t consistently used for all tasks.
As the team started to scale, they began facing significant “growing pains”. What worked before, had now become more complex and wasn’t working smoothly anymore - or took significantly longer than in the past. Increased wait times in between tasks, collaboration issues, less-than-optimal working hours and process bottlenecks were all contributing to increased time spent on design work, project delays and recurring client-facing mistakes.
The chosen approach included a mix of audits, data analysis and process change implementation.
Laura began the audit with an analysis of current workflows and practices, looking at high-level data gathered across different tools, including Slack, Loom and ClickUp. This was followed by 1:1 team interviews and surveys, to really understand current pain points from the team’s perspective. From this, Laura identified a number of “quick win” process improvements to aid collaboration, which she implemented before moving into a more in-depth data analysis.
One challenge that was identified during the initial audit was that while the team had many sources of rich process data, they weren’t utilising these effectively as they were not easy to access. To overcome this, historical data was categorised and labelled, and task templates on ClickUp were changed to give a more granular understanding of time grabs and bottlenecks.
Laura then created a dashboard in Google Data Studio (now Looker Studio), which included detailed data on time tracked, time estimates, turnaround times as well as qualitative data gathered on the team’s wins and challenges. This was combined with a structured process for regular reporting to allow the operations and leadership team to gain better insights into the day-to-day working of the design team, to ultimately make more informed decisions.
Using the insights gathered through the data analysis process, a number of change initiatives were identified and implemented. Through the resulting process changes, we were able to save the team 100+ hours per month, while improving turnaround times and the team’s wellbeing and job satisfaction. Highlights included:
All these were achieved while the design team maintained a 100% annual employee retention rate - a happy team is a more productive team!
The Hey Digital team was now also set up to continue gathering, analysing and monitoring key data through the live dashboard and reporting system, allowing them to make further incremental improvements as they scaled.
