Rocketlane Automations: Making time for work that matters

This is the latest edition of RocketFuel, an interactive workshop series, where we bring in experts who are building Rocketlane to learn the nuances of delivering delightful onboarding experiences.

Our guest for the episode is Vedika, an avid golfer and a product manager at Rocketlane. She is the brains behind one of our game-changing features: Rocketlane Automations.

Automation in business: Looking to the future

Facing mounting pressure to do more with less in a demanding economy, businesses are turning to technology as a necessity, not a luxury.

Enter automation, the solution to efficiently and productively manage operations at scale.

Automations not only enhance performance, but also contribute to the well-being of employees and allow businesses to thrive amidst uncertainty.

According to a workflow automation study by Formstack, businesses that embrace automation can reap multiple benefits. For instance, by automating certain aspects of their operations, they have the potential to save up to $46,000 annually.

Furthermore, automation allows for the standardization of 76% of daily operations and simplifies 36% of regulation and compliance work. These figures are significant and measurable, making them highly appealing to stakeholders and business leaders alike. Ultimately, such tangible impacts facilitate seamless business scaling.

Rocketlane’s State of Customer Onboarding survey 2024 reveals that a whopping 62.1% of onboarders feel the biggest time sink at work was following up and chasing customers and project stakeholders for approvals. It’s also the activity that most of them want to automate. Automation and standardization of processes is also one of their top goals for 2024.

‍

A question we often come across when talking to customers is how automation helps employees and individuals who automate repetitive tasks. For starters, we believe it reduces stress because you're not constantly doing the same things. And it gives you back the time to focus on high-value work that moves the business needle, and scale with confidence.

‍‍

But automation is not new to us!

At Rocketlane, we take the time to understand how businesses operate and identify repetitive tasks that we then bake into our product. For instance, we already have:

Templates: Create once, reuse forever

This is one of the first ideas that we automated inside Rocketlane. It began with a focus on eliminating repetitive tasks, particularly in customer-facing teams. Templates addressed the need to streamline processes for recurring project tasks, documents, and updates, whether on a weekly, quarterly, or monthly basis. This included the templatization of feedback from clients. The tagline encapsulates the essence: "Spend time creating it once and use it forever.” It underscores the efficiency gained by automating these repetitive elements, saving time and effort for ongoing projects.

SmartFill: Dynamically insert content on the fly

SmartFill acts as a cheat code that you can use to capture dynamic information at a project or task level. You can also use this to personalize your communication with customers or even bring in information from your tech stacks into Rocketlane through our powerful integrations.

The objective is to eliminate the need for repetitive manual entries, such as addressing individuals by name in notifications. With SmartFill, users can insert dynamic information, like a customer's first name, automatically, enhancing the efficiency of communication. While similar to placeholders in CRM or helpdesk systems, SmartFill in Rocketlane takes personalization to a deeper level by dynamically incorporating information present within a project or task throughout the platform.

Rocketlane Automations: Putting business workflows on autopilot

‍Rocketlane Automations takes tedious tasks off your plate, from project kickoffs to delivery, while building exceptional customer experiences and keeping everyone in the loop. It allows you to automate across projects, phases, and teams, conquer delivery chaos, and streamline operations without sacrificing customization. 

Rocketlane Automations redefine project management, putting the power in users' hands to construct tailored workflows that suit their business needs. This feature introduces a range of capabilities, enabling users to expand automation seamlessly across projects, phases, tasks, and forms. 

From flagging overdue tasks to automating customer interactions with warm welcome emails and satisfaction surveys, it fosters a customer-centric approach. Moreover, it empowers users to reduce unpredictability in project deliveries by crafting escalation matrices and maintaining control over timelines. The collaborative dream of cross-team coordination becomes a reality with streamlined transitions between project phases. Rocketlane Automations also ensure standardized operations across the organization while allowing flexibility for unique project needs, delivering efficiency without repetition and customization without complication. In essence, it transforms project management into a cohesive, customer-focused, and streamlined experience.

At Rocketlane, we’ve thought about automations on two levels, one is global, and the other is template-level.

Global automations are more for your account-wide use cases, while template automations can be used for more specific cases.

The possibilities with automations are endless. There are multiple ways to customize workflows to fit your business and standard practices. You can set it up globally or using templates.

Here are a few workflows businesses can automate in 2024:

Project templates tailored to different customer segments

Say your company specializes in software implementations for clients across various domains and sizes. To efficiently navigate this diversity, you can set up different project templates catering to SMB, mid-market, and enterprise clients. Each implementation adheres to a set of standard practices, such as personalized email invites sent at project kickoff, detailing project information and points of contact. As proactive leaders, this means you’d have preemptively designed an escalation team to address potential pitfalls, ensuring a smooth implementation process at every step. Whether tailoring project templates or proactively addressing challenges, your approach would exemplify strategic foresight and adaptability, ultimately enhancing the success of your software implementations.

Automate monitoring and management for large-scale implementations

Consider a scenario where your company is entrusted with critical enterprise clients, and it is really important for you to closely monitor their implementation journey. Your goal is to ensure a seamless process that not only meets their expectations but also potentially garners positive reviews through a dedicated feedback form. Traditionally, the process involves manually logging in, identifying off-track projects, incomplete tasks, and pending customer emails – a time-consuming laundry list of housekeeping tasks. However, with automations, this cumbersome routine can become super simple. The focus then shifts from routine housekeeping to strategic oversight, allowing for a more efficient and impactful management of your critical clients' implementation journeys.

Rocketlane Automations: Product roadmap

Here’re a couple of enhancements we’re working on for our automations:.

1. We're introducing webhooks and HTTP requests, both outgoing. This means you can freely retrieve information from Rocketlane and use it in the format you want, whether it's the format we provide or a format of your choice. You also have the flexibility to customize several aspects when extracting data from our platform.

2. The second type is the ‘set schedule’ trigger. For example, if you want to run your weekly stand-up or have a monthly catch-up with your team leads, you can set it up. You can also set it to measure if someone submits a form every Friday evening, and be notified if someone hasn't submitted it. Basically, any routine tasks that require meetings or follow-ups at specific intervals can be automated using the set schedule trigger.

FAQs on Rocketlane Automations

1. Can I set up an email to be sent out on a specific day every week to assign users within our company to private tasks?

Yes, our ‘set schedule’ triggers solve this. It allows you to repeat activities on a weekly, monthly, or even quarterly basis.

2. Can you leverage automations to drive product adoption?

Yes, Rocketlane Automations can help you drive product adoption and help your customers derive the expected value of your product. For instance, if delayed responses are leading to drop-offs, it can be mitigated by setting customer-centric triggers, notifying internal teams to expedite replies and keep customers engaged. Rocketlane Automations offer versatile solutions, and they can be customized to suit your specific use case. 

3. Is it possible to set up an automated email for a project with an approval step? The idea is that the PM edits the standard email before it's sent when the automation is triggered.

Yes. Let's break down the process into steps. This can be seamlessly achieved through two distinct automations.

Step 1: Trigger the email to your PM for editing. 

Step 2: Initiate an approval process where the Business Manager reviews the email. 

Step 3: Set up another automation that sends the email to the customer when a specific task is marked as completed. 

4. Can you use Rocketlane Automations for logging emails from Hubspot?

Yes. You can push information from Rocketlane through webhooks and HTTP requests, enabling seamless data transfer to any system of your choice. In terms of sending emails, Rocketlane Automations make it easier. For instance, you can utilize Automations to send emails, and by adding the email address to the Bcc field, you can effortlessly log these emails in systems like HubSpot. Additionally, Rocketlane APIs, a feature upcoming in the near future, will provide you with end-to-end flexibility to transfer information efficiently.

5. How can customers who are not a part of the project on Rocketlane be kept in the loop and notified of project statuses? Can we send them our weekly status reports and alerts through Rocketlane?

Yes, we can do this with Rocketlane’s Send Email action. With the Send Email action, you can effortlessly notify individuals outside of Rocketlane, ensuring key stakeholders are in the loop. This is no longer a manual process, eliminating the need to ponder over whether an email should be sent or if it's worth someone's time. By tying it to automation triggers and defining conditions, you can seamlessly incorporate email notifications into your automation, keeping everyone informed simultaneously, even those not directly using Rocketlane. Many of our customers, particularly leaders who prefer staying informed through their inboxes, have found great satisfaction in this feature.

6. We want to avoid creating a one-size-fits-all template for our projects. Instead, we would like a self-assembling Lego block approach where we ask our customers a few questions during the discovery or kickoff stage, and based on their answers, we build a customized plan for them. Currently, this process is done manually, but could it be automated with the help of Rocketlane Automations?

Yes!. We can set up triggers and conditions to act on form responses. And depending on the customer's response, we can automatically import templates related to it.

For example, if a customer selects JIRA and Slack integration in the form, our automations can automatically fill in the remaining phases with the JIRA and Slack templates we've created. This eliminates the need for manual intervention and saves you from having to review your customer's answers.