Wrike Makes a Team of Online Marketing Experts Super-Productive

Organization. Laura Roeder is a popular online marketing strategist and social media expert.

Challenge. Organize virtual collaboration of a team running numerous projects at a time.

Solution. Wrike became a collaborative environment, where the team shares, assigns and discusses tasks, uploads files and tracks the activity of the whole business.

Result. The whole team gets things done 3 times faster than before.

Interview with Laura Roeder, Popular online marketing strategist and social media expert

Tell us a little about yourself and your business. What did you need project management software for?

I am the founder of Roeder Studios, a boutique firm specializing in social media marketing. My business is helping SMBs to market themselves online via social media and other online marketing tools. I have several online training programs that work really well for businesses that have neither plenty of money nor loads of time to spend on marketing consultants. My most popular free program, The Dash, provides weekly step-by-step video instructions on how to rock out your Web presence. Our small business has been growing a lot recently, so we needed an easy way to stay on top of things. I've done a lot of research, looking for a way to stay organized with all the online projects we have, and this is how I came to Wrike.

Why did Wrike win you over?

I tried many Web-based project management tools, including GoPlan, Basecamp, ActiveCollab and lots of others. What I didn't like about them was that their view of a project did not line up with mine. I wanted to easily be able to break projects down into many small sub-projects, and it was either impossible with these solutions, or it took too much time and ruined my productivity. Another big piece that didn't go well with me was the fact that they charge per project. It simply doesn't make sense for our small team that has to deal with dozens of small and big projects simultaneously.

Wrike was appealing because of its flexibility, first of all. I can track numerous tasks and projects in one workspace. Another thing that I fell in love with was the per-user pricing. In Wrike, I accommodate an unlimited number of projects, and the price will not go up.

What challenges did you have while organizing your projects? How did Wrike help you overcome these challenges?

Our team works from three locations: California, Hawaii and the Philippines. So you can probably imagine that we have to deal with the time zone madness, when we're hardly ever all three on the computer at the same time. Before adopting Wrike, we basically worked out of our email inboxes, receiving requests from our clients and answering their questions. This was not very productive, as emails can easily be missed or lost. We had to create paper lists of tasks that need to be done. My table was literally buried under those lists.

Everything is so much better now, as we've got Wrike. It's good to have a system so well integrated with email. When clients give me something to do, it's done mostly via email. Now I can simply forward my email conversation to Wrike and assign it to a specific project, and it will automatically become a task with a due date. It saves so much time! Wrike's email notifications about my team members' actions are also very convenient. They help me stay up-to-date even when I'm not logged in at wrike.com.

How does Wrike help you to organize your workflow?

Wrike supports freeform collaboration, and I guess that's why it works perfectly for our team. We don't have a clear hierarchy. Our team members assign tasks to each other and then report to the whole team on what they have done. This collaboration pattern saves us lots of time and makes us way more productive than we would be with the traditional, top-down management approach. Wrike turned out to be a great collaboration platform where we can create tasks, share them with other people, assign and reassign our to-dos, and track our progress all together.

What's your favorite Wrike's feature?

Wrike's flexible structures, of course! I always say that getting things done fast is perhaps the most important skill you can have to make your business move forward. Wrike's flexibility allows us to be super-productive, and it helps our own business grow rapidly.

In Wrike, each team member can organize things in his or her own way. I really like that, any time I have a set of tasks, I don't have to create a project and fill in all the different settings. I create a folder or a sub-folder instantly and set a task list in minutes. The ability to put one task in more than one folder is another useful feature. It helps us view our tasks from different angles, so none of them is missed or forgotten. In addition, I love the ability to easily sort tasks and projects by responsible people, by due date, by client or by other parameters, so that I have a clear picture of who needs to do what and when. In other tools, you won't find this simplicity.

Do you plan to invite more team members to join Wrike?

Definitely, as my team grows, I will introduce the newcomers to Wrike. Wrike made it super-easy to add new people and reassign existing tasks to them, so it makes adding new team members a pleasure.