We cut admin work by 32% and started shipping projects 11 days faster — without firing anyone or hiring a PM.
I'm Maya, ops lead at Northwind. We're a 24-person branding studio in Antwerp and for two years I was the human glue between Trello, Notion, Harvest, Loom and a 1Password vault nobody trusted. Here's how we collapsed all of that into Logbook in about four weeks — and what actually changed for our team.
“Switching to Logbook felt like turning the lights on. Briefs, vault, time and client comms in one place — onboarding new PMs takes a morning, not a week.”
How it started
We had six tools and still didn't know what was happening.
Hi — I'm Maya. I run ops at Northwind, a branding and web studio that's been around for about nine years now. We're 24 people split between Antwerp and a few remote folks, and we mostly do brand systems for D2C companies in Europe.
Before we moved to Logbook, our stack was — and I'm not exaggerating — Trello for boards, Notion for briefs, Harvest for time, Loom for async videos, Slack for everything else, and a shared 1Password vault that honestly nobody really trusted. We had a Google Sheet for clients passwords too. Yeah. I know.
Every Monday I'd open six tabs just to know what each project was actually doing. Every Friday I'd chase three designers for missing timesheets so finance could send invoices. By the time I got home Friday night I was just done.
What four weeks on Logbook actually changed.
32%
Admin time recovered
I tracked my own week before and after. The Friday timesheet chase used to eat 4 to 5 hours. Now it's basically zero — the timer lives on the card, so logs are already there when finance opens the report.
6→1
Tools we cancelled
We killed Trello, Notion, Harvest, Loom, the 1Password team plan and our shared Dropbox folder. Slack stayed because, well, Slack. But it stopped being our project memory.
11 days
Faster delivery on avg
We measured 18 projects pre-Logbook and 22 after. The handoff between strategy and design used to lose a week to 'wait, where's the brief again?' That just doesn't happen now.
$48k
Annual SaaS savings
We were paying around $52k a year across the old stack for 24 seats. Logbook came out to about $4k. Finance was the first one to high-five me.
Why we switched
It wasn't ambition. It was burnout.
We didn't pick Logbook because we were looking for project software. We picked it because we were sick of paying for six things that didn't talk to each other. Honestly the deciding moment was when one of our designers, Ines, lost an entire afternoon because the figma link in Notion pointed to a deleted file, and the brief in Trello had a different version, and nobody could find which Loom Tom had recorded explaining the change.
Three tools. Same project. Different versions of the truth. I sat down that night and made a list of everything we needed in one place: boards, time, briefs, files, secrets, client comms. Logbook was literally the first thing that ticked all those boxes without bolting on a Frankenstein of integrations.
Our actual rollout — week by week
I want to be honest — it wasn't a six-month migration. It was four weeks and most of it happened on its own.
- 1
Week 0
We didn't make a 30-page migration plan
I picked one project that was just starting (a rebrand for a Rotterdam coffee company) and said: this one runs entirely on Logbook. If it works we keep going. If it doesn't, we go back. Took me about an hour to set up the board, vault and report template.
- 2
Week 1
Three more projects migrated themselves
Once the team saw Tom logging time on the card without opening Harvest, they just started doing it too. I didn't even announce it. By Friday three more PMs had moved their projects over.
- 3
Week 2
Vault was the unlock
The thing that won everyone over wasn't time or boards. It was the vault. Designers stopped Slack-DMing me asking for the staging FTP password. Onboarding a new contractor went from 'wait i'll forward you 12 messages' to 'i added you to the project, you have access to everything.'
- 4
Week 4
We cancelled the rest
Finance cancelled Trello, Notion team, Harvest, Loom and the 1Password team plan in one afternoon. I think she actually clapped. Quick note — we kept Notion for our company wiki, just not for project briefs anymore.
What changed for the team, in plain terms.
Same team. Same projects. Different tooling.
Before
The old way
- Designers logged time in Harvest at end of week — when they could remember what they did
- Briefs lived in Notion, but always got 'updated' in Slack DMs
- Client passwords were in a Google Sheet (or someone's brain)
- PMs spent every Friday reconstructing the week
- Onboarding a new hire took a full week of 'and this is the tool we use for...'
- Loom links rotted in Notion docs nobody opened twice
After
With Logbook
- Timer starts when work starts, on the card. End of day auto-stop catches what we forgot
- The card is the brief. Everyone updates it. Nobody DMs me about it
- Vault is per-project, encrypted in the browser. Contractors get scoped access, then it expires
- Reports generate themselves. PMs review and send Friday morning
- New PM onboarding is one Logbook tour. Half a day, max
- Async videos attach to the card they're about. They don't get lost
“The thing I tell other studio ops people: it's not really about the features. It's about the fact that I stopped being the human API between six tools. That's the bit I want you to hear.”
Maya Lin
Operations Lead, Northwind Studio
What didn't go perfect
The honest part — what we had to figure out.
Look — I'm not going to pretend everything was perfect. The first two weeks our junior designer Pieter kept forgetting to start the timer and then trying to backfill it later. We had to actually set the auto-start preference on his account before it became muscle memory. Small thing but worth flagging.
Also: clients didn't immediately love the portal. Two of them ignored their invites for like three weeks. But once one client started using it (asking questions on cards instead of email), the others followed. By month three our biggest client was logging in twice a week to check progress. We didn't even have to push them — the link was just always there in their email signature footer thanks to the report.
What we're still seeing.
24h
Reclaimed per PM per month
Three PMs, each getting roughly a day back monthly from not chasing timesheets, briefs, or 'where's the asset?' That's basically a free senior designer's worth of hours every quarter.
94%
Client renewal
We didn't expect this one. Renewals went up because clients felt looped in. Two clients explicitly said the portal was a reason they extended for another year — even when our pricing went up.
0
Lost passwords (since)
We used to lose access to a client's CMS or DNS account about once a month, usually when the freelancer who set it up ghosted us. Hasn't happened once since the vault.
If you're thinking about it
Here's the only advice I'd actually give.
If you're a studio in our shape — 15 to 40 people, juggling 8 to 15 active projects, drowning in tabs — I'd just say: try one project on it. Don't migrate everything. Don't make a plan. Pick the next project that starts and run it on Logbook. You'll either love it by week two or you'll know it's not for you, and either way you've learned something cheap.
We didn't switch tools. We collapsed our stack. There's a difference, and you'll feel it.
Want to try it on one project?
Spin up a 14-day workspace, import a single board, see what happens. If it doesn't click, no harm done.