Why We Built a Client Portal Instead of Sending More Status Emails

Every agency has the same Friday. A client emails to ask where things stand. Someone digs through chat, a tracker and last week's invoice to piece together an answer. It is accurate, and it is already out of date by the time it is sent.

We decided the fix was not a better status email. It was removing the need to ask.

Start with the question, not the feature

Before building Azarr Console, we wrote down the questions clients ask us most:

1. What are you working on right now?
2. What has been finished?
3. What do I owe, and for what?
4. Who do I talk to about this?

Every screen in the Console answers one of those. If a feature did not, it waited.

One project, one home

The biggest design decision was making the project the centre of everything. A company can hire us for more than one thing at a time, and mixing them is how things get lost. So chat, requests, invoices and the changelog all belong to a project, and people are added to projects individually. A new team member at the client sees only what they were invited into.

Visibility is a feature, and so is hiding things

Transparency does not mean showing everyone everything. A designer on the client side may need the changelog and chat but have no business seeing invoices. So owners can hide entire areas from a member. Hidden is stronger than disabled: the screen is simply not there.

Proof of work, written by the people doing it

The changelog and README for each project are written by the team building it, in the tools they already use. That keeps the record honest, because nobody is translating it afterwards.

What we would tell another team

• Write the client's questions first, and build to answer them.
• Scope everything to the unit the client thinks in (for us, the project).
• Give owners control of who sees what, with hidden as the default for sensitive areas.
• Let the record be written by those closest to the work.

We will keep refining the Console as clients use it. If your team is wrestling with the same Friday, we would like to hear how you handle it.