While Huly is quickly becoming a popular choice for software developers and product teams for to manage their own internal workflows, we’ve also noticed that Huly has grabbed the attention of small businesses and micro agencies who are using Huly to organize complex client projects. With Huly’s highly configurable settings for workspace customization, teams that provide products and services for clients are finding it easier to keep all of their tasks and resources in Huly rather than syncing between multiple apps.
As our team at Huly moves towards supporting more interactivity between workspaces and enhanced communication tools, I’ve been interested to learn how small businesses and agencies are using the current version of Huly to manage multiple client projects. By understanding how these teams organize their workflows on Huly right now, we can learn how to better support these workflows in the future.
I’ve had the opportunity to connect personally with several entrepreneurs who’ve moved their teams to Huly, and was especially excited to speak with Ryan Luttrell, CEO and founder of Outside the Box. Outside the Box is a digital marketing, design and development studio based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Ryan’s team works with clients all over the world to deliver high quality websites, software solutions and digital marketing campaigns.
Above: Outside the Box co-founders Ryan and Victoria Luttrell
Ryan and I caught up about how his experience has been since switching to Huly, and how the platform has helped him and his team keep track of tasks, communicate with clients and stay organized with projects.
Life before Huly, and why switching to Huly was a “no-brainer”
Outside the Box is currently in an important phase of their own growth as they’ve evolved from a side project into a thriving digital agency with a steadily expanding client base. As a result, it’s become crucial for them to find a workflow management solution that can keep up with the dynamic nature of their projects. Keeping all the ships afloat in a fast-growing agency like Outside the Box is a daunting task, and I had to know how Ryan and his team were managing it all before they switched to Huly.
Ryan shared with me that prior to switching to Huly, his team was juggling a handful of apps to manage their work: Jira, Slack, Google Drive, and BambooHR, to name a few. Trying to keep things organized and synchronized across so many different tools came with a host of pain points and headaches. As Outside the Box grew in scale, a critical need emerged for a more comprehensive management tool that could bring all of their team resources together in one collaborative platform.
When Ryan came across Huly through a post shared by the PixelPoint design team, he immediately saw the potential in Huly’s all-in-one approach. “Huly is really young,” Ryan told me, “but it looks like it could replace a lot of the tools that we’re using.” Excited by the prospects for Huly’s future, he began switching his team over to the platform.
Configuring Huly for multiple client projects
Everything in Huly is managed through spaces, which can be configured with their own settings and permissions. Teams can build any kind of structure on top of this foundation, using spaces to organize their work depending on what they need. By granting permissions only to designated members for each space, managers can control access to resources within a single workspace. This enables various teams and projects to work together seamlessly on client projects without compromising privacy for sensitive information.
“The thing that’s made Huly stand out for us is the level of configurability,” Ryan told me. “I can build out whatever schema I want for any chunk of knowledge I want to store, and link it to anything else in the workspace. That alone has been a game changer for us.”
Outside the Box works with a wide range of clients, from tech-savvy companies to small businesses that outsource all of their digital needs to Ryan’s team. Some of his clients have Huly workspaces themselves, while others communicate with Outside the Box through external channels. I was fascinated to learn how Ryan has configured Huly to manage projects for clients with such diverse needs and communication styles.
“By default, we’ve made all of our projects private,” Ryan explained. “Then I’ve granted access to our team to everything in the workspace. For one of our clients, I’ve made an account for them and they have access only to their own project.” By adjusting the permissions settings for each space, Ryan is able to effectively safeguard sensitive internal information while still allowing clients to interact with their own project’s task tracker, documents and resources.
Ryan also works with one of his major clients through a separate workspace. “Our agency is leading their technical team, so we created an entire new workspace for them,” Ryan told me. “We actually have their entire company running on Huly now as well.”
How Huly’s all-in-one approach supports intricate workflow tracking
The same project management tools that have been used for years tend to focus on one niche capability — for example, Trello for kanban-style tracking, Notion for documentation, or Slack for messaging. While some of these apps offer add-ons, integrations and workarounds to accomplish other common work tasks, it’s impossible to manage dynamic and complex work processes with any single one of these apps. Instead, teams are left with no choice but to force their own processes to fit within a rigid structure, rather than adapting the tool itself to reflect their real dynamic workflows.
As an “everything app”, Huly integrates all the essential features a team needs into a single platform, seamlessly connecting them to enhance productivity and collaboration without the hassle of juggling multiple cumbersome tools. During my conversation with Ryan, I was encouraged to hear that this approach has been instrumental in keeping Outside the Box on track with their client projects.
When I asked Ryan which feature of Huly his team found most useful, he spoke about this interconnectivity of the platform: “The most valuable tool has been being able to link an issue within a conversation, or having conversations around a specific issue,” Ryan shared. “We love this feature because it helps contextualize the conversation.”
Ryan also mentioned that his team is already migrating from Slack to Huly, and once the mobile app is available this interconnectivity will make switching to Huly the clear choice over competitors.
Paving the way for the next generation of Huly
While Huly has already established itself as the go-to platform for all-in-one project management, the current product offers just a glimpse into the promising future of the next generation of Huly.
Teams are already leveraging Huly to manage client communications, but some challenges remain. For example, Ryan’s clients might reach out through Slack, email or other external channels, which in turn requires someone on the Outside the Box team to manually translate that information into some kind of Huly object, such as an issue, document or internal team message.
The next generation of Huly will address these challenges by enabling global communication between users. Whether or not they are a member of a Huly workspace, users worldwide will be able to communicate smoothly through interconnected channels on the Huly platform. This advancement will open the door for teams to manage their work entirely within Huly, without the need to synchronize information across multiple apps and tools. “When you think about where this product is now and where it could be a year or two from now,” Ryan explained, “it’s a no-brainer to make the switch because it’s so advantageous to have everything in one place.”
This next generation of Huly, featuring a more comprehensive approach to information management and enhanced process tracking capabilities, is on the horizon. In the meantime, exciting changes are coming to the current Huly platform even sooner. As we refine our existing communication system and work towards completing our mobile app, teams are already beginning to enjoy enhanced chat performance and soon (in our upcoming release) will be able to connect with Huly from their mobile devices using Telegram. Huly users will be able to receive and respond to messages and notifications right from their mobile devices, marking a significant step towards a promising future ahead.
“Huly is a young company that’s moving really fast,” Ryan remarked. “They have a vibrant community that their team is unbelievably responsive to. But most things just work.”
We’re as excited about Huly as Ryan is, and conversations like these help guide our team’s thinking as we move into the future of Huly. You can join in the conversation in our Slack group, and if you’d like to share your own story with Huly, feel free to reach out to me directly at abigail@huly.io to be featured in an article like this one.
