When I joined Zethic, SABA Hospitality was a continuous engagement with no project management process. The client was assigning tasks straight to developers and chasing them for updates himself. Devs were getting pinged out of focus, the client wasn't getting updates fast enough, and nobody had a single place to put anything down. No sprint planning. No QA gate. No way to see who was on what.
I built the process. Daily standup first. Then a ClickUp workflow that devs, QA, and the client (acting as product owner) all actually followed. I learned the product well enough to challenge scope and sequencing instead of just routing tickets, and eventually owned the production deployment process too. The team grew to eight developers and a QA engineer under all of that.
Production incidents dropped. I helped plan the infra upgrade. By two and a half years in I'd moved into Senior PM responsibilities at Zethic, so I trained up a junior PM and handed the engagement to them. It kept running.
Before
- No project management process. Client assigning tasks straight to developers and chasing them himself.
- No sprint planning. No QA gate.
- Nobody could tell who was on what or where anything stood.
- Production deployments happened whenever whoever was free could push them.
- Developer interrupt rate high. Client response cycle slow.
After
- Daily standup. ClickUp workflow everyone actually followed: devs, QA, and the client as product owner.
- Sprint planning in place. QA gate in place. Ticket ownership clear.
- I owned the release process. Documented it. Pushed the deploys myself.
- Product calls made with the founder, not at the devs. Engineering left alone to build.
- Production incidents down. Infra upgrade planned. A trained junior PM running it now.