Use case · product studios
A studio sells a fixed number of hours and then delivers against a board that has no idea what was sold. Both halves are tracked properly and they live in different tools, so the overrun is real from about week two and only becomes visible when someone raises the invoice.
Rather than wait for invoicing to reveal the overrun, the studio handed over the join. Every Friday the droid reads what was sold, what has been burned and what is still open, then tells the project lead while there is still room to move.
The 70% threshold came from arguing about it. 80% was already too late to renegotiate.
Every project trips the same loop:
One Friday across nine projects. Six were fine and said so in a line each; two needed a lead to look; one had doubled its burn rate in a week.
Six projects tracking to scope. One line each in the roll-up, no DMs sent.
78% of sold hours burned, 40% of scope closed. DM'd the lead with both numbers and the projected finish at 21% over.
Burn rate doubled after two people moved onto it mid-week. Flagged as a rate change rather than an overrun, since scope was still on track.
Nine projects, two DMs, one roll-up to the MD at eleven lines.
We used to find out at invoicing. Finding out in week three means we can still talk to the client about scope rather than about a bill.
An illustrative workflow built from real product mechanics. The connected apps, the Friday schedule and the 70% threshold are how a droid actually runs; the studio, the quote and the figures are composites rather than a customer's numbers.
Copy the brief below and paste it into Unify. It’ll walk you through the prerequisites, connect what it needs, and stand the workflow up with you.
We're a product studio and we bill fixed-scope projects. Connect Linear, Harvest and the Google Sheet where we keep sold hours per project. Schedule a task for Friday at 16:00. On each run, pull logged hours per project from Harvest, open and closed issues per project from Linear, and the sold estimate from the sheet. Work out hours burned against hours sold, and the share of scope closed. Using the burn rate over the last two weeks and what's still open, estimate where each project finishes. Flag any project over 70% of sold hours with less than half its scope closed, any project whose burn rate doubled week on week, and anything projected to finish more than 15% over. Send each flagged project to its lead in Slack with the numbers, and post a roll-up to the MD with one line per healthy project. Don't message clients.
Tell us the job that never gets done before close. We'll wire it up on a call and you can watch it work.
