Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

I spent a day in New York with agency leaders, operators, and industry experts at OPERATE'26, Teamwork.com's inaugural Agency Leaders Summit. The conversations covered scaling, profitability, AI, talent, and leadership. But the strongest takeaway wasn't fear about the future. It was optimism. Here's what the day kept coming back to.

Scope creep doesn't announce itself. It shows up as "a small tweak" here and "one more round of revisions" there. By the time you notice, the project that was supposed to be profitable is bleeding money. I've spent years managing projects inside professional services firms and now at Teamwork.com. The pattern is always the same: small, untracked additions that seem harmless but collectively eat the entire margin.

Growth looks exciting from the boardroom. More customers. More revenue. More headcount. More opportunity. But for the people responsible for turning strategy into reality, growth feels very different. It feels like communication breaking down. Managers becoming stretched. Processes that once worked suddenly collapsing under the weight of scale. Customers experiencing the impact before leadership dashboards ever reveal a problem.

Jira was built for software developers. If you're running client projects, managing budgets, or tracking billable time, you've probably felt the friction. The tool that powers sprint boards brilliantly can make a simple client status update feel like configuring a space shuttle.

We're always looking for ways to make the work you do in Teamwork.com feel simpler. Over the past year, one theme that has consistently appeared in customer conversations, product research, and your direct feedback? Task Details—one of the most heavily used areas of Teamwork.com—can sometimes feel busy, overwhelming, and maybe even a little cluttered at times.

Project planning rarely starts with task assignment locked in. You know the work that needs to happen, but the exact people? That often comes later. Until now, tasks in Teamwork.com required you to assign work to a specific user or team from the start. That created friction during early-stage planning, especially when task assignment decisions were still evolving.

The core question every professional services operations leader needs to answer: can your team actually deliver the work that is likely to close? Generating pipeline is only half the challenge. The other half — the one that quietly breaks delivery teams — is knowing whether you have the capacity to absorb that work before contracts are signed and start dates are set.

Project setup is one of those tasks that everyone knows is important, but nobody enjoys doing. With the new version of the AI Project Wizard, your team can turn client briefs into full-fledged projects within seconds. Thanks to new improvements based on your feedback (including ready-to-use task lists and better syncing with documents), project planning will feel less like administration and more like acceleration.

Creating quotes should help your team move opportunities forward—not slow them down with repetitive setup work, endless searching, or manual intervention. That's why we're introducing three major improvements to Quotes: Together, these updates make it easier to create consistent quotes, find the information you need faster, and tailor Quotes precisely to the way your team, and clients, work.

The gap between tracking project data and presenting it well is where most delivery teams lose time, credibility, and control. I've watched operations directors spend hours every week assembling status decks from three different tools, only to field the same questions from leadership that the data should have already answered. This guide covers what to track, when to track it, and how to present project data so it actually reaches the right people in a format they can act on.