At Meaningful, we've always believed that the best way to solve client problems is to be operators ourselves. That's why we don't just talk about optimization and efficiency—we live it, breathe it, and build tools around it.
Today, we're excited to share the story of how our internal challenges led us to build Supervisible, a team planning tool that's now helping agencies across the industry. But more importantly, we want to talk about why building products makes us better partners for our clients.
The Meaningful Philosophy: Learning by Doing
One of our core values at Meaningful is giving our team the ability to have a playground for trying new skills, learning new things, and experimenting with new marketing channels. We don't just want to be consultants who give advice—we want to be operators who understand the challenges firsthand.
This philosophy has led us to build multiple products over the years. Each project teaches us something new about user experience, product development, go-to-market strategies, and most importantly, the real pain points that businesses face daily.
When Our Own Growth Created the Perfect Problem
As our agency grew beyond 12 people, we hit a wall that many of our clients know all too well: team planning chaos. The informal coordination that worked perfectly with a smaller team suddenly felt like we were trying to conduct an orchestra while blindfolded.
Our founder, with his production engineering background and obsession with marginal gains theory, naturally turned to what he knew best: process optimization. If small improvements could help a cycling team dominate the Tour de France, surely they could help us manage our growing team more effectively.
We started with Google Sheets—elaborate, script-heavy spreadsheets that tracked everything from individual capacity to project timelines. For two years, we lived in these spreadsheets, constantly refining and improving our system.
Learning from Our Network: The Agency Ecosystem Perspective
Here's where having a diverse network of agency friends and colleagues became invaluable. Through countless conversations with creative agencies, digital marketing firms, development shops, and consultancies, we realized our struggles weren't unique.
Every agency we talked to had their own version of the same problems:
- "Can we take on this project without killing our team?"
- "Who's available and who's overloaded?"
- "How do we balance full-time staff with freelancers?"
- "Are we pricing projects accurately based on our actual capacity?"
We spent extensive time understanding how different types of agencies operate. Creative agencies have different rhythm patterns than development shops. Marketing agencies juggle campaigns differently than consulting firms. But underneath all these differences, the fundamental challenge remained the same: visibility and control over team capacity and workload.
The Great Tool Hunt: When Off-the-Shelf Wasn't Enough
Convinced that someone must have solved this problem, we embarked on an exhaustive search through existing tools. We tried everything from simple project managers to enterprise workforce planning platforms.
The disappointing reality? Nothing came close to matching the functionality of our custom Google Sheets system. Every tool felt like it was built by people who had never actually managed an agency team.
This experience taught us something crucial about product development that we now apply to all our client work: the best solutions come from deep, lived understanding of the problem.
Leveraging AI: Turning Our Playground into a Product
The emergence of AI-powered development tools aligned perfectly with our philosophy of giving our team room to experiment and learn. We're also lucky enough to have my co-founder Alberto Sadde, who brings extensive engineering experience to our team. Alberto has been leading and teaching our developers to become full stack developers, creating an environment where suddenly, building custom software didn't require a massive development team or months of planning.
We saw an opportunity to not just solve our own problem, but to create something that could help the entire agency ecosystem we're part of. This wasn't just about building a tool—it was about deepening our understanding of operational challenges that our clients face every day.
Introducing Supervisible: Born from Real Agency Pain
Supervisible emerged from this journey—not from market research or competitive analysis, but from years of lived frustration and iterative improvements. We built it to address the specific challenges we and our agency network face:
Workload Planning & Capacity: Real-time visibility into who can do what, when, without the spreadsheet gymnastics.
Resource Allocation: Smart recommendations for balancing workload between team members and projects.
Freelancer & Hiring Management: Seamless integration of contractors and full-time staff in planning and budgeting decisions.
Budget & Cost Management: Accurate project pricing based on actual team capacity, not gut feelings.
Deadlines & Delivery: Proactive identification of potential bottlenecks with actionable solutions.
Communication & Visibility: Centralized dashboards that keep everyone aligned without endless status meetings.
Why Building Products Makes Us Better Partners
Every hour we've spent building Supervisible has made us better at what we do for our clients. We've experienced firsthand the challenges of user research, product positioning, technical development, and go-to-market execution.
When we help a client optimize their operations or launch a new product, we're not just applying theoretical knowledge—we're sharing battle-tested insights from our own journey. We understand the difference between features that sound good in meetings and features that actually solve problems.
We know what it's like to make tough prioritization decisions, to balance user feedback with technical constraints, and to iterate based on real usage data. This operational experience translates directly into better strategic advice for our clients.
Continuing the Conversation
Building Supervisible has reinforced our belief that the best agencies are operators first, advisors second. We continue to spend time with our network of agency friends and colleagues, not just to improve our tool, but to stay connected to the evolving challenges our industry faces.
Every conversation teaches us something new. Every agency we work with has a slightly different approach that could improve how we all work. This collaborative mindset—both in building products and serving clients—is what makes the agency ecosystem stronger.
The Bigger Picture
Supervisible isn't just a tool we built—it's a representation of how we approach every challenge. Start with real problems, involve the community affected, iterate relentlessly, and never accept "good enough" when you can build something better.
Whether we're helping clients optimize their operations, launch new products, or navigate complex challenges, we bring this same hands-on, operator mindset to everything we do.
If you're an agency struggling with team planning and workload management, we'd love to have you try Supervisible. And if you're working on operational challenges that could benefit from our hands-on approach, let's talk about how our experience as builders can help accelerate your success.
After all, the best partnerships happen between people who truly understand the work.
Ready to transform your team planning? Visit supervisible.com to request early access. Want to talk about operational challenges? Reach out to our team at Meaningful.
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