SPLIT Development: “Worksection helped us understand where we were losing business”

Ivan Tryhub
Co-founder and CEO of SPLIT Development
Togeth­er with Ivan Try­hub, co-founder and CEO of SPLIT Devel­op­ment, we dis­cussed the for­ma­tion of his com­pa­ny and the specifics of projects, the advan­tages of Work­sec­tion com­pared to Jira, as well as the prob­lems of a fixed price.

Tell us about your company

SPLIT Devel­op­ment was found­ed in 2019. I am the CEO of the agency. Our team is doing design and e‑commerce. Now it’s more Shopi­fy and Word­press, but we’re grad­u­al­ly expand­ing to Node.js as well. We have almost no clients in Ukraine, so we work with the West­ern market.

Screen­shot of projects from the SPLIT Devel­op­ment website

We start­ed work­ing togeth­er with the co-founder of the com­pa­ny, Dmytro Kar­pov, and we real­ized that we do not want to hire expen­sive spe­cial­ists at the begin­ning, because at the very start it kills” the busi­ness a little.

In gen­er­al, I was a front-end devel­op­er, so we taught our acquain­tances and friends the front-end, and that’s how we start­ed work­ing with the first cus­tomers. I did sales, led projects and helped the guys by check­ing their code.

But we quick­ly expand­ed, start­ed to get projects, and hired a project man­ag­er. With these steps, after about a year and a half, we got Shopi­fy. And now the Shopi­fy devel­op­ment team has grown to 11 – 12 people.

What tools did you work with before Worksection?

At first, we worked with Trel­lo, the free ver­sion with 12 projects avail­able, but because of a rather reduced func­tion­al­i­ty, we want­ed to come to some­thing more sta­ble. Then we worked with Jira. But Jira has become a lit­tle expen­sive, as the team began to scale. Besides, it also had lim­it­ed functionality.

For exam­ple, we all work with a track­er, but there is no track­er there. So once a friend of mine (also an agency own­er) rec­om­mend­ed Work­sec­tion. We had an intro, lis­tened to every­thing and liked it.

Project Dash­board in Worksection

Why did you choose Worksection?

Because Work­sec­tion has very cool fea­tures. For exam­ple, time track­ing. When we first start­ed work­ing with the tool, I began to ana­lyze how much time the design depart­ment, the Shopi­fy depart­ment, and Node.js spend on projects. And when I con­vert­ed all this into how much we should receive, the num­bers I had were high­er than what we actu­al­ly received. There­fore, let’s say, analy­sis appeared.

It is also very con­ve­nient that in Work­sec­tion you can appoint a respon­si­ble per­son for an entire sec­tion at once, who will be respon­si­ble not for a spe­cif­ic task as a whole, but for a cer­tain stage.


For exam­ple, the devel­op­ers moved the task from one stage to the Ready for QA” stage, but for­got to appoint a tester. The tester then can­not add time there, because it’s not his task”. But when the task is trans­ferred between stages and the respon­si­ble per­son is changed auto­mat­i­cal­ly, it’s cool.

And if we com­pare our work now with how we worked with Jira, I can say that Work­sec­tion is more con­ve­nient: con­ve­nient time analy­sis, reports. For us, this is the best. It offered many use­ful fea­tures, and it helped us grow and under­stand where we were los­ing in the business.

Fixed-price prob­lems

For a while we had been work­ing with a fixed price, but there are a lot of dif­fi­cul­ties with this approach. For exam­ple, we can start a project and break it into stages. We are com­plet­ing the first phase and start­ing the sec­ond. Then the client sends cor­rec­tions to the first stage and we make them, fin­ish­ing the sec­ond stage. But we can’t get paid until we make the first one perfect .

Now we work more at an hourly rate. At the begin­ning of the work, we always pro­vide the client with an esti­mate, not­ing that the expens­es may be high­er or low­er. Because we can­not cal­cu­late per­fect­ly how many hours we will spend in the end.

Our devel­op­ers and design­ers work with a track­er, man­agers do not track time. Because you can count the work­ing hours of a devel­op­er and a tester, but not the time of an accoun­tant, for example.

Where does the team com­mu­ni­cate about projects?

We com­mu­ni­cate more in Slack. But if there are any ques­tions about the tasks, then we’d rather write com­ments in the Work­sec­tion, so that it does­n’t get lost in the Slack chat later.

For exam­ple, some­thing has changed in the design. The client saw the design, he liked every­thing, but he looked on the web­site and decid­ed that some but­ton should be a dif­fer­ent col­or. Such details, where the client makes changes, are record­ed in the Work­sec­tion, that is, in the com­ments or in the task descrip­tion, so that the tester can see it dur­ing the inspec­tion and under­stand why the site dif­fers from the layout.

When should teams imple­ment a sys­tem like Worksection?

The man­age­ment sys­tem should be in place from the very begin­ning. We had it from the very begin­ning, we just did­n’t know about Worksection.

Some teams sim­ply use Trel­lo, for exam­ple. But as the team grows, you look for some oth­er solu­tions. For us, Work­sec­tion is price-qual­i­ty”, i.e. not too expen­sive, like Jira, and even more func­tion­al­i­ty just for us.

Watch the full video inter­view with Ivan on our YouTube-chan­nel.​

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