The problem with being a one-person team
When you’re a freelance product consultant, you wear every hat. You’re the PM, the stakeholder manager, the documentation department, and the person who sends the weekly update email on Friday afternoon even though you’d rather be wrapping up the sprint.
Marcus had been running his own product consultancy for three years when he took on a startup client — a six-person SaaS company building a logistics tool. The engagement was simple in theory: Marcus would own the product roadmap, run discovery, and hand off prioritised specs to the client’s small engineering team.
In practice, it was fragmented. The roadmap lived in a Google Sheet. The specs lived in Notion. The status of any given feature lived in Marcus’s head, which he exported weekly into a long email the client half-read. Scope debates happened regularly — not because the client was difficult, but because neither party had a shared, up-to-date picture of what had been agreed.
“Every second week I’d get a message that said something like ‘I thought we said X was in this release.’ And sometimes they were right, and sometimes they weren’t, and either way we’d lose forty-five minutes untangling it.”
Finding a tool that worked for both sides
Marcus had used project management tools before, but they were built for engineering teams running sprints — not for a consultant who needed to share a living roadmap with a non-technical founder.
What he needed was something his client could open at any time and understand without a guide. Something that showed what was planned, what was in progress, and what had been decided — without Marcus having to narrate it.
He set up Stokik with a single project for the engagement. The canvas became the roadmap: each initiative was a card, connected by dependency arrows, with a status that Marcus updated in real time as the work progressed. The client got view access and could check it whenever they wanted.
“The first time she opened it and said ‘oh, so Search is blocked on the API work’ — without me having explained it — I knew this was working.”
What replaced the Friday email
The weekly update email disappeared. In its place: a short “Weekly Snapshot” document linked directly to the project canvas, updated by Marcus each Friday. Three sections — what shipped, what moved, what’s next. The client read it in the tool, commented directly on the passages they had questions about, and Marcus responded in the same thread.
No email chains. No “can you forward me that doc.” The conversation was attached to the thing it was about.
“She started adding inline comments on the spec docs during the week — things like ‘is this the right priority given what we heard from users last Tuesday?’ That kind of engagement never happened when docs were in Notion. I think she just didn’t feel like it was her space to comment. But when I tagged the paragraph and said ‘this is the open question’ — she answered it.”
Scope, resolved
The bigger change was in how scope decisions were handled.
Previously, when a feature changed — scope cut, priority shifted, approach changed — Marcus would update the Google Sheet and send an email. The client might see it, might not. There was no audit trail of what had been agreed and when.
With Stokik, every change was visible on the canvas in real time. When Marcus moved a card from In Progress to Scope (meaning: we’re revisiting this), the client saw it. When they agreed to cut a feature, Marcus updated the spec and published a new version. The version history recorded the change with a timestamp.
“The scope debates stopped because there was nothing to debate. Either it was on the canvas or it wasn’t. Either the spec said it or it didn’t. We could look at the same thing at the same time.”
In six months, Marcus had one scope disagreement that required more than a ten-minute conversation to resolve. Previously, it was roughly one a fortnight.
The renewal
At the end of the six-month engagement, the client renewed without a negotiation. Marcus attributes part of that to the quality of the work, and part of it to something harder to measure: trust.
“She felt like she knew what was happening at all times. Not because I was over-communicating, but because the information was just there when she wanted it. That’s a different kind of confidence than ‘Marcus sends good emails.’”
He now sets up a Stokik project at the start of every new engagement, gives clients view access from day one, and treats the canvas as the primary deliverable of the planning work — not a document filed somewhere else.
“Clients pay for clarity. The clearest thing I can give them is a canvas they can read without asking me what it means.”
Marcus now includes Stokik access as a standard deliverable in his engagement proposals, describing it as “your live roadmap — readable at any time, updated as we go.”