The problem with bespoke everything
A good design agency prides itself on tailoring its process to each client. The problem is that “tailored” can quietly become “inconsistent” — and inconsistency has a cost.
This nine-person agency was running eleven active client engagements simultaneously. Each project had its own planning format: one client used Notion, another preferred a shared Figma board, two used spreadsheets, one insisted on weekly email summaries, and the rest used whatever the lead PM had set up at project kickoff.
When a lead PM went on leave, the handover took a full week. When the agency principal needed to see portfolio-wide status, she had to manually compile it from eleven different sources. New hires took months to get fluent with “how we do things here” because there was no single “how.”
“We had great client relationships,” the principal said. “But our internal operations were held together with memory and goodwill. That doesn’t scale.”
The decision
The agency had looked at project management tools before and rejected them as too engineering-focused or too heavyweight for a consultancy context. What they needed was something that could work as both the internal planning layer and a client-facing artifact — something a stakeholder could look at in a review meeting and immediately understand.
They piloted Stokik across three projects for six weeks before rolling it out to the full portfolio.
How they use it
Each client project is a workspace. Within the workspace, the project canvas maps deliverables (not tasks — the agency works at the deliverable level) with dependencies and statuses. A typical engagement has fifteen to twenty-five canvas nodes.
The document layer replaced their status reports. Instead of writing a weekly email update, lead PMs update a shared “Weekly Snapshot” document linked to the project canvas. Clients have read access and can check it anytime. Client questions dropped significantly once stakeholders could see status on demand rather than waiting for the weekly email.
Handovers take ninety minutes, not a week. When a PM rolls off a project, the canvas and documents contain everything: what’s done, what’s in progress, what’s blocked, and why decisions were made. The incoming PM reads through the document trail and looks at the canvas; the outgoing PM answers questions. That’s the handover.
The principal has a portfolio view. The folder structure gives her a single place to check all eleven active workspaces. She can see which projects have cards stuck in “in progress” for too long, which are close to completion, and which have open blockers.
Metrics after six months
- Zero missed client milestones in the six months after adopting Stokik (compared to three in the six months prior)
- Project admin time down ~50% across the PM team — the saved hours went into design work and client communication
- New hire onboarding for PMs went from “three months to be effective” to “three weeks” — the canvas format is learnable; the old bespoke formats weren’t
- Client NPS increased by 12 points, which the principal attributes partly to clients having real-time visibility rather than waiting for weekly emails
What they’d do differently
“We should have standardised our status labels earlier,” the principal said. The team initially let each PM use whatever node statuses made sense to them. It took a few weeks to agree on a consistent vocabulary — one that clients could also understand without explanation.
Their current standard: Scoping → Ready → In Progress → In Review → Done. Every client sees the same labels. Every PM uses the same language internally.
“It sounds obvious,” she said. “But it took a portfolio-wide view — which we finally had — to see that we were doing it differently everywhere.”
The agency has since productised their planning approach as part of their client onboarding package, using the Stokik canvas as a collaborative kickoff artifact on every new engagement.