ClickUp Sprints aren’t just for Dev teams

In this episode, Micah and Beau share the behind-the-scenes changes that reshaped how their team manages client work. After years of juggling multiple projects, they decided to shift their entire production and implementation process into one-week sprints using ClickUp.

They walk through how their system works. From organizing client folders, using parent and sub-tasks to keep ownership clear, and relying on sprint reports to plan, forecast, and manage workload in real time. The result has been smoother communication, stronger accountability, and a noticeable jump in team performance.

You’ll learn:

• How moving from workload views to sprints simplified scheduling and reduced chaos
• Why separating parent tasks from sub-tasks creates clarity for both project managers and developers
• How ClickUp’s sprint reporting helps forecast team capacity and track progress
• Simple ways to monitor task types, priorities, and workload balance
• The benefits of giving your team structure and flexibility at the same time

If you manage ongoing client projects or lead a production team that’s drowning in deadlines, this conversation shows how one practical change can bring organization, momentum, and focus back to your operations.

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Transcript

0:00:00 - (Alane): Welcome to Automate Your Agency. Every week we bring you expert insights, practical tips and success stories that will help you streamline your business operations and boost your growth. Let's get started on your journey to more efficient and scalable operations.

0:00:18 - (Micah): So, Beau, on this episode I thought it'd be really interesting if we talked about the changes that we've made internally on how we're managing our own production and implementation team. This is a change that I never thought I'd hear us talking about or get to, but we've made this change and it's been amazing.

0:00:40 - (Beau): So it was a very big change for us, but we did it. And what we're talking about is we've switched to using Sprints inside of ClickUp.

0:00:48 - (Micah): I was going to say hopefully we're talking about the same change here, otherwise it's going to be a very awkward episode.

0:00:54 - (Beau): Yeah, but we've, we've kicked into using Sprints and you know, traditionally, I know that most organizations that are development focused, they focus on Sprints. But hey, I mean we do development, right? We're developing things and yeah, we are. Look at us, look at us just developing stuff. But no, it's, it's been a really good change, you know, for. We manage multiple client projects at once, multiple objectives per client.

0:01:20 - (Beau): It's really helped us to provide some autonomy to the team to help them kind of plan out their week and to knock out the things that get added to the sprint.

0:01:27 - (Micah): Makes project management a lot easier too. So on our side we don't have to, I would say the non production side, we don't have to specify every single task, every single due date, every single piece of that and then constantly spend all of our time moving that around. Yeah, we're looking, we're doing one week sprints, which is shorter than typical Sprints, but it allows us to look at a week at a time.

0:01:52 - (Micah): And you and I, not too long ago just got through Sprint planning for next week already. So next week is already set up and ready to go. So let's talk a little bit about how we set this up. We use ClickUp and we have client folders or folders in ClickUp, I guess I should say that represent each client and then under that we have lists that represent each kind of maintenance project or main kind of category of work that we're doing for each client and then each task is a request within that body of work.

0:02:26 - (Micah): So if we're doing AI agents, we might have a number of tasks of all the different AI agents we're Building for a client. And then within each task, we have an automatic template that gets applied with subtasks of all the steps to complete that agent for that example.

0:02:44 - (Beau): Right.

0:02:44 - (Micah): Did I miss anything?

0:02:46 - (Beau): No, you hit all of it.

0:02:47 - (Micah): All right. Everybody probably already shut off this episode because of. I don't know about that explanation.

0:02:52 - (Beau): That was intriguing. Come on. No, I, you know, it is. We've got those layers to it, but in the actual request themselves, when you, when you drive it down into the subtask, I mean, that main parent request task is really that. Everything that houses this is what we're trying to do on this particular request. And we use the description heavily to do that. So we're. We're providing our team members with all of those details related to that particular request, giving them access to any of the assets that the clients have provided. And then those subtasks really kind of focus on those milestone level things that we're looking to accomplish on it. And it's cool because the work gets assigned via the sub tasks to our team, but we do all of our communication in the parent task.

0:03:36 - (Micah): So, yeah, that's an important delineation because we've experimented with both and it sucks communicating in the subtask. Nobody likes that.

0:03:46 - (Beau): No, nobody does. We get down in the subtask and things get lost. People are saying, hey, you commented on this, I can't find it. And then we're digging for it, especially if we're trying to do a status update. We can't find where that last comment was, and that could be a pain. But it has been helpful doing things on that parent task level, but then really tracking progress on that subtask level, so to speak. And we're using a done status too, which is something that we, we added in so it doesn't disappear from our subtask list.

0:04:17 - (Beau): When something's marked as done, it's sitting there. And we can see when it was done and we can see that it actually got completed.

0:04:22 - (Micah): So before we switched to Sprints, we were working out of the workload view and a variety of other just views that we were trying to piece things together. We also didn't have a really good strategy for subtasks, or maybe not as clear of a strategy for subtasks, and that. That created a little bit of overwhelm, a little bit of extra administrative work. But when we dialed the subtasks in to the milestones, like you're saying, and didn't worry so much about the workload view and started shifting those subtasks into Weekly sprints. We can now look at a request and go, oh, that's next week, that's the week after, that's the week after, that's the week after that.

0:05:03 - (Micah): And suddenly we have just scoped out three or four sprints worth of work for one request, and we can even start forecasting how much work and how many weeks and how many sprints out we have work for and see everything in the Sprint reporting.

0:05:20 - (Beau): It's.

0:05:21 - (Micah): It's amazing.

0:05:22 - (Beau): That was the defining factor for us was really that forecasting out into future sprints. I mean, we have, we have some clients that will come in that'll say, I just want this one thing like, okay, cool, we'll drop it into a sprint, stretch it out across a couple of weeks or a few weeks, however long it takes us to get the majority of that done. But there are some clients that come in and they have a roadmap of things that they want to work on. Right.

0:05:42 - (Beau): They have plenty of objectives. We've prioritized those. And we want to make sure that as we're doing sales, you know, that, that we know exactly when we can start somebody's project versus saying, yeah, come on in, we got you. We can take care of it. So it helps us forecast a great deal. But, Maika, you mentioned something when you were talking about how we were utilizing the subtasks, applying them to sprints. A very specific delineation is that inside of ClickUp, you have the ability to add a task to an additional list so you can essentially multi home tasks.

0:06:15 - (Beau): We're not doing that on the parent task level. We're doing it on the subtask level. And when we say that, it's essentially we have our client project or client list that. Or that particular project or category list that's sitting there. But that's where our request is sitting. But our subtask, while it's inside of that, that parent task is getting confusing. I hope everybody follows this. But in our subtask, we have that linked into the sprint list, essentially.

0:06:42 - (Beau): We can see it not only in the class in the client list, but also in the sprint list. And again, it keeps that parent task out of the sprint. And we're just working on those individual milestones that we're trying to reach. So we're not clogging up our sprint with one big task.

0:06:59 - (Micah): Yeah. And I would even say, you know, we came across a couple other epiphanies over the last year or so of honing this system. And, and one of them is, well, who owns What? And once we added the subtasks that represent the allocation of work and then being able to use those subtasks to map out across Sprints, that means the parent tasks can be owned by the account manager or the project manager, the person interfacing with the client.

0:07:28 - (Micah): And then we're not always changing assignees based on like, oh, it's the account manager, now it's the developer, now it's the project manager, now it's the account manager, like we used to have to do all the time, especially when we were using Asana, we did that a lot. But now when we have the parent task and the subtasks, everybody gets allocated work, everybody knows who's doing what if a bug comes in, if a new feature request comes in, that's a new subtask on that request.

0:07:56 - (Micah): But the owner of the parent task is always the account manager. So it's very clear who owns this request. You know, they can see it on their my tasks. The subtasks are handled for every individual develop development team member. So they can actually go to the Sprint or their my tasks and see what's going on. And it's been super, super helpful.

0:08:17 - (Beau): Yeah, I think, you know, one of the best things about it too is just having the Sprint reporting.

0:08:22 - (Micah): I was just gonna say we should probably talk about that.

0:08:24 - (Beau): We should, I think you should talk us through that Micah, because you've got a really good viewpoint on that and how to kind of manage that Sprint as we're going.

0:08:30 - (Micah): I feel like I'm gonna get too technical on it, so. Jump in, Beau. But the, the, the benefit, some of the benefits of leveraging the Sprint reporting and Sprints and ClickUp is that you have a burn down chart. And that's going to sound like who? Maybe not everybody listening knows what that is, but essentially it's a forecast of if we have a hundred, let's just say items in a sprint, a hundred tasks in a sprint or subtasks, technically how many per day do we need to complete so that by the end of the sprint we're at zero to do.

0:09:04 - (Micah): So we start with a hundred to do, we end with zero to do. And what is that trend line that burns down from day one to day seven? And what that allows us to do is each day go, are we on track? Yes or no? It is one simple chart. We can look at it, it's all color coded. We know how much work got done today and the day before and where are we at compared to that trend line? I'm a huge Fan of that chart. I can just look at it in one second and go, we're right on track. Don't even have to worry about anything. It.

0:09:34 - (Micah): It hits Wednesday and we're halfway through the week and we're right above or below that trend line. I feel fine. Because we're, on average, we're, we're nailing it. We're understanding exactly, you know, our time estimates. We've done well forecasting and allotting the work to this week, so everything's great. The other piece of sprints that I really love with the sprint reporting is the velocity chart. And so essentially, after you run a few sprints, let's say you run this for a month, you have four weeks of sprints.

0:10:06 - (Micah): Four different sprints. If you're running them one week sprints, it's really complicated math that I'm doing here, Bo. What it gives you is basically the history of how many tasks has the team completed. So how many did we put into the sprint? How many were completed, what's the offset and the percentage? And watching the trend lines on that. So over four weeks, what's our current velocity? On average, we can look at it and go, oh, we can get, I'm just using round numbers. We can get a hundred subtasks done per sprint. Awesome.

0:10:42 - (Micah): We know that if we then start loading 120, 130 tasks, we're pushing the current team. We know if we only load 50 tasks, we're underwhelming the current team and they might have extra space for stuff. But where this really gets important and, and particularly in our case is that we have a lot of ad hoc stuff that comes in. So urgent requests, new requests that we need to tackle bugs or issues that came in with automation. We want to have enough room in our sprints to account for that. So we can fill part of our capacity and part of our team with those ad hoc urgent requests without going, holy crap, I was already at capacity. And now we have these requests coming in and it's Thursday.

0:11:29 - (Micah): So we can leverage the velocity and adjust the capacity of the sprints and our team to know exactly how much room to give. I think there's one final piece that I'm going to pass back to you, Beau, to explain, which is the task types that we use so we can visualize in the sprint reporting how we're allocating or how different team members are tackling different types of work.

0:11:56 - (Beau): So we, we utilize multiple task types. So the main task types that we have are new feature task types. So anytime client comes to us and says, hey, I want to add this to a build. This is something we haven't talked about before. This is a new feature for it. We have a task type for that. We have one for bugs or errors. So anytime there's an issue with the automation, we have a workflow task type. We have a WMS build task type. Am I missing one? We have a time block as well. That's just for random stuff, a document task type as well.

0:12:25 - (Beau): So what's great about that though is not only does it give us the ability when we are doing the reporting to understand the makeup of our team's work and what's come in throughout the week, but it also allows us a little bit of insight into how our team operates. So if, if somebody gets a, a new feature request on an existing build, are they jumping at that first before they move forward with a brand new build that we haven't, you know, even started on yet for prototyping or something like that? But also how quickly are we getting to bugs and errors?

0:12:56 - (Beau): We can report on those things. When was it created? When did it get completed? So there's, there's a lot that we've been able to do with that. And what's really important with that is if we look at each of our, each of our team members and we look at what they've all been assigned, we can start to see person a here has 10 hours of new builds. Then they have three hours of feature request and then maybe six hours of errors and bugs.

0:13:23 - (Beau): Okay, cool. Well, now let's take a look and see what exactly is going on with those bugs. Find out if it's something that's related to a build that's already existing and there's something new that we can do with it. So it does kind of help us silo those things into understanding more about how our team operates and how well things are going on individual projects.

0:13:43 - (Micah): Yeah, we correlate that sometimes with status too, because then in the Sprint reporting, we can see for each individual person, how many, how many tasks do they have and what statuses are they in? Is it all in to do and they haven't touched anything and it's Thursday and Beau, you and I are going, what the hell is happening? Or is it that never happens, by the way? No. And then. Or is it a nice diversity or are they mostly complete? Like that's kind of the gut checks that I do when I'm checking throughout the week. I'll go in and see like how, how much of that Column chart is green.

0:14:21 - (Micah): Just as a quick glance to go across the team. What percentage of tasks are already done or complete?

0:14:28 - (Beau): Yeah.

0:14:29 - (Micah): And we can just get a super quick gut check. Are there any outliers? Is there anybody sitting there with not a lot of green? Are they stuck on something? Do they need help? And it allows us to jump in and kind of support the team without being like, yo, where you at? Where's this at? Where are we at here? And driving people crazy because they're working hard at it.

0:14:50 - (Beau): Right. And, you know, I think there's. There's that piece of it and there's also. It gives us the opportunity to jump in and redelegate tasks if we need to. You know, if there's things that we absolutely need to get done and we want to see forward progress on, we can jump in and we can redelegate.

0:15:04 - (Micah): And, you know, great, great point on that. Yeah.

0:15:06 - (Beau): I mean, and we've seen situations to where somebody will blast through everything they need to get to through for the week. Everybody else is looking good. Cool grab from the next sprint. Right. Let's get ahead. So it, it gives us a lot of visibility into all those things. And, you know, I think that for us, it really is good to see just at a high level where everybody's at, seeing their statuses. Maybe I missed a comment on a roadblock task and I can jump in and look at the statuses and say, this person has three roadblocks.

0:15:37 - (Beau): What did I miss? What did someone else miss? And we can jump in and facilitate whatever change we need to on that. So very telling.

0:15:44 - (Micah): Yeah. So we've spoken this entire episode from our perspective. In a prior episode, you talked about how you run the dev team meetings every Monday.

0:15:55 - (Beau): Yeah.

0:15:56 - (Micah): And I know this has been a topic that's been brought up. Maybe we should share some of the things that we've heard from the team since we've implemented this.

0:16:05 - (Beau): Absolutely. So I talked a about it a little bit at the beginning, but the autonomy to plan your week a little bit better. Everybody has a different approach to their work, especially in the type of work that we do. You know, there's, there's opportunities where you can bulk manage your workload. So if, if there's a particular client that you have all of these tasks for, and then you're able to look at it and say, well, I need to create dev plans or I need to create diagrams or prototypes. And for all of these, they can bulk them together. So it allows them to do that in a. In a quick and easy way.

0:16:36 - (Beau): And, and plus, it's just, it's allowing them to see from the Sprint itself they're no longer having to use their MY tasks all the time. Because we're not assigning due dates to the majority of this stuff unless it's urgent and we have a hard deadline, we're able to leave those subtasks without due dates. So they simply favorite the current Sprint and every week it changes that Sprint. So when they click on it, it defaults to a Me dynamic or Me mode view for them.

0:17:03 - (Beau): So they're seeing everything that's assigned to them. And the team itself, they love having that. They love seeing what's on their plate and being able to cherry pick what they need to work on. And we do that heavily with priorities.

0:17:15 - (Micah): Right.

0:17:15 - (Beau): We'll have stuff that say urgent. That means this should be the first thing you focus on. We have things that are high. This should be next normal and low. So they can pick and choose some different things as they're going and really have the autonomy to build out their week really well. So it's really changed.

0:17:32 - (Micah): So. Bo, sorry, I want to. I want to touch on something because you're. You're bringing up a point that we have struggled with for a long time. And what you said, I'm paraphrasing, is that people have different ways that they like to work. And we have tried to build our own system in a way that we think is the best way that it should work. And we'd hit this point where maybe half the team is like, this is awesome.

0:17:59 - (Micah): And the other half is like, this is the dumbest crap I've ever seen.

0:18:03 - (Beau): Yeah.

0:18:04 - (Micah): And then we change it. And the first half that loved it is like, I hate this. And then the second half is like, yeah, this is what I'm talking about. And there's never been a moment where everybody has enough autonomy within the system to do the way that they need it to, to happen, for them to do their best job, to get the work done. Until now. Right.

0:18:27 - (Beau): Totally does. It completely opens them up to being able to truly work how they want to work. And, you know, it has been great because it did take us a little bit to get everybody on board and understand all those logistics and the SOP of everything. But once that locked in, it makes so much more sense to the team. We've put instructions in their subtasks. They know exactly what needs to happen. So it's. It's really been good for them to be able to, number one, like I said, have the autonomy to do what they do what they want as far as their approach to the week with the identifying factors of what do we need to have done first with the priority flagging and all of that, or even due dates if we need them.

0:19:04 - (Beau): But yeah, I mean, the, the team is really enjoying that, and we've seen that. I think it was like the second week, Micah, that we were doing sprints, you had brought up, you had sent me a slack message and you were like, I can't believe how much we've gotten done. This is probably our best week. I mean, we were like Wednesday or Thursday into the week, and us as account managers were scrambling, being like, where's the rest of the work?

0:19:26 - (Beau): How do we get them more work? And I mean, it really did. It sent the productivity through the roof on that. So they had everything in front of them. There were no questions. It held us accountable as account managers to ensure that we were getting them the work that they needed and the information they needed. So it's certainly helped everybody all around. I think everybody's loving it.

0:19:47 - (Micah): Awesome. Great way to end the episode, too. Everybody loves it.

0:19:50 - (Beau): Everybody loves it. You should do it, too. Everybody loves it.

0:19:53 - (Alane): Thanks for listening to this episode of Automate youe Agency. We hope you're inspired to take your business to the next level. Don't forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and leave us a review. Your feedback helps us improve and reach more listeners. If you're looking for more resources, thank you. Visit our website at biggestgoal AI for free content and tools for automating your business.

0:20:14 - (Alane): Join us next week as we dive into more ways to automate and scale your business. Bye for now.