Frankensteined: Ultimate Lead and Project Management Stack for Development Teams

Produced in collaboration with Connor Novak and Dennis Lee.

With our lives becoming increasingly busier, our daily routines are more sophisticated and more evolved than ever before. Fortunately for us, new tools have been devised to make our complex routines much more efficient and effective. These tools are relatively easy to use, cost-effective and when used appropriately, can significantly improve our time management and our lives. With software like Wave, Salesforce, and Mailchimp on the market, gone are the days of having to build up a massive amount of capital to start your business. Lean start-ups are popping up faster than ever before, which spells opportunity to those who may be interested in taking the plunge and starting their own business.

By utilizing automation and integrating different software, we have “Frankensteined” a tool specifically for small to medium sized development companies to help manage their leads, clients and workflow. Generating sales leads and managing your customers is the life blood for any entrepreneur, and it needs to be perfected. The aim of this project is to make generating leads and attracting new customers more streamlined and effective while seamlessly managing the current jobs.

Let’s start off with a list of apps we used, a brief description of what they do, and how we used them in context of our Frankenstein:

1. Pipedrive — This is essentially a CRM software that can be used to manage sales. With this app, you can manage your leads, track deals, and moderate associated tasks. We used Pipedrive to do just that, a way to manage our leads. In our particular case it had everything we needed to use as our operational base, keeping track of sales leads, activities, and deals being proposed to potential clients. We will also be using Pipedrive to track the proposals made to potential clients, but more on that later. We’ve explored other lead management software such as HubSpot and Salesforce but they were too complex for our desired purpose of a minimal management system for a small to medium sized development firm. However, this is purely preferential, feel free to adapt our process to a lead management software of your choice. Pipedrive offers three different packages to choose from starting at $12.50 per month.

2. Wave — This cloud based software is one of the easiest to use to handles finances. It creates invoices for customers, handles payroll, and essentially anything that require a sales receipt. We will be using Wave to create estimates and invoices made for deals that are presented to potential clients. The software is free to use. You will only incur costs is utilizing their credit card processing feature (2.9% plus 30 cent per transaction) or their payroll feature which is it an additional cost.

3. TimeHero — This is a task scheduling app. TimeHero allows you to automatically schedule tasks for projects using templates and moderate activities for an individual or for an entire team. We will be using TimeHero as the core of our project management. This will manage the workflows of all current clients’ projects. Time Hero also offers three different packages starting as low as $12 per month per user.

4. Slack — This is the ultimate internal communications tool for your team. It is a shared workspace for organized interactions. With dedicated customizable message boards you will always be in the know and have a detailed record in one place of all your communications. We are utilizing Slack not only for the streamlined internal communications but also for ease of scheduling (through our integrations) of small tasks and “to-do’s” that may arise mid conversation. Pricing for Slack depends on the size of the organization and its intents. Small teams can use the basic features of Slack for free.

5. GitHub — This software is for developers. GitHub is mainly used for version control and source code management using git. However, it has several other features for developers such as development management, team management, and much more. We will be using it to track GitHub issues (tasks, enhancements, and bugs) and schedule them for follow up and completion in our TimeHero calendar. GitHub is free to use for all public repositories. However, for private projects you can get a personal account with unlimited collaborations for the low cost of $7 per month.

All of these apps will be integrated and moderated with the use of Zapier. Zapier is the medium for software integration without the requirement of code knowledge. It creates “zaps” between multitudes of web apps which can be used to perform more complex functions or simply automate tasks. Zapier will be the foundation for all our integrations. Zapier has three different packages: Free, where you can automate personal tasks. For work, which costs $20 per month and can be used to automate your business. For Teams, which costs $250 per month, in which you can share zaps with your team members.

Our solution is comprised of five zaps. Each zap performs a function to help integrate the features of each piece of software into our Frankenstein, the master management program. In total, our stack costs a minimum of $30.50 per month. Our zaps include:

• GitHub to Slack
• Pipedrive to Timehero
• Pipedrive to Wave
• Slack to Timehero
• Wave to Pipdrive

To start off the process, you would be using Pipedrive to manage your leads. When your lead enters the “Proposal” stage in Pipedrive, we want a corresponding customer to automatically be created in Wave. This prevents from having to go back and forth between two screens copying and pasting your lead’s information. The zap we created automatically send the lead’s info into Wave and creates a new customer.

First, we selected the filter we wanted to trigger the zap:

When a deal enters proposal stage, we want Wave to automatically create a new customer:

Completely customizable, but we wanted the following information to be sent over to wave to be appended to each invoice: company name, customer, and email.

There is many other additional info inputs you can send over such as currency, website, etc. Here’s out before and after in Pipedrive and Wave, respectively:

This not only saves time of recreating the customer in Wave but also decreases the likelihood of data entry error. In our example, we have a John Doe Studios deal and a Jane Doe Inc deal. For each of the proposals, a customer has been created in Wave, ready to be sent a proposal estimate.

Next, we wanted to solve the problem of tracking multiple estimates and keeping an accurate historical record of changes. When an invoice is created and sent to any given organization from Wave, we now have Wave automatically attach that invoice to the company file in Pipedrive. This allows us to maintain that historical track record of estimates/invoices and also allows for easy storage and access to the invoicing all from within Pipedrive.

We used a Wave invoice as our trigger:

We put in a filter for the zap to sift through our list of Pipedrive customers for a matching customer name:

And lastly, we simply attach the invoice with an ID and a “Customer Name Invoice” title:

Our before and after of the John Doe Studios invoice created in Wave and automatically being attached to the Pipedrive client file:

Fast forward the negotiations and payment logistics, now that we’ve landed the deal, our next zap will create a project work-breakdown-structure in our project management software, TimeHero. Pipedrive deals move through status stages until eventually being marked as “won”. This zap creates a new project in TimeHero every time a deal is won:

In our zap, we set up our settings for the project to be given a name of “Organization Name Project”, in our specified folder, and even using a work-breakdown-structure template of building a website from scratch. If considering, all projects will be equal in work, we’ve even set a deadline, 60 days from start, and a start date, day 0 (meaning start scheduling today).

And here you can see out before and after of the Jane Doe Inc Deal going from deal “won” in Pipedrive to Jane Doe Inc Project in TimeHero:

You can even see the start and due date specified which we set in our zap settings. This allows the user of TimeHero to perform minimum if not negligible scheduling activities. Time Hero is fantastic for automatically scheduling your calendar based on your available time and the duration of each task.

Now that we have our work scheduled, it’s time to get our hands dirty with development. We know no matter how well a project is planned, it’s bound to face some hurdles and face a bug or two. One of the most important factors of success during this time is clear communication. For development specific related issues we can use GitHub “Issues” feature which will go hand in hand with version control yet it doesn’t provide an instant messaging feature for discussion. GitHub is limited to post like messages on a message board. With our preferred communication of instant messaging we decided to simply post all our GitHub issues to a dedicated channel on Slack. We called it the #gitissues channel.

From now on when an issue is created in GitHub, it is automatically sent as a message to #gitissues on Slack. This not only provides our desired instant messaging but also allows project managers to easily check in on all known problems in one place without having the knowledge of how to navigate GitHub.

Our trigger for GitHub is when a user creates a new issue. GitHub will then send a channel message to Slack:

We’ve then specified the format of the message text, for which we additionally included a URL for developers ease of access back to GitHub:

Here you can see the before and after of the issue created in GitHub and how the message looks like on our Slack channel:

Our final zap takes care of scheduling all the nitty gritty tasks that come up throughout the project through communication. Often, when talking to a team member, several new tasks are identified that weren’t thought of before. Our goal was to create an easy way to track the communications and with the click of a button, schedule, or at the very list add the task to your to do list. This is when we came up with a Slack to TimeHero integration.

With our primary internal communications tool being Slack, this integration uses starred messages as the trigger. The starred messages automatically trigger a task creation in TimeHero. The task then goes to your TimeHero inbox, where you can add work estimate, a due date, and even delegate the work to a team member.

Here’s our before and after of any given message being starred in Slack, and automatically appearing in your inbox in TimeHero:

And those are our integrations for an automated lead and project management process for small to medium development teams. What we love about Zapier is the versatility we are able to achieve with endless options. Let us know your thoughts, recommendations, and what you end up doing with Zapier!