Saving hours per sprint at SoftwareMill

Software Agency

Scala Development

Poland

100+ employees

Key results:

2.5x faster estimate creation

Higher client engagement

4h less spent per sprint

Pawel Toroj

Head of Projects at SoftwareMill

"Apropo cosmically facilitates conversations with clients about scope, modifications, and versions thanks to managing what the client sees and what they don't. In addition, it allows us to create templates and rules that instantly help us estimate subsequent phases of the project. And on top of that, the feature of exporting estimates to Jira saves several hours per sprint in our team alone."

What is SoftwareMill and what’s your role there?

SoftwareMill is a Warsaw-based software development agency with over 100 people and a member of the Virtus Lab group, recognized as the largest software house in Europe focused on Scala technology. I am working as the Head of Projects at Software Mill.

What estimation challenges were you trying to solve?

Managing high-level Scala projects requires a sophisticated way to discuss scope modifications and project versions with clients while maintaining internal speed. Because of that, we were trying to address the following problems:

Chaotic scope conversations - Discussing adjustments, iterations, and project versions with prospects was complicated because we lacked a clean way to separate internal alignment notes from client-facing data.

Repetitive estimation workflows - Scoping and pricing subsequent phases of a project took too long because we had to manually re-create estimation guidelines and rules each time.

Administrative sprint overhead - Transferring completed estimate structures into our active tracking environments forced our project management teams to waste valuable hours manually recreating the product backlog.

The Solution: A Repetitive Pricing & Backlog Machine

Apropo helped to solve each of them in the following way:

Granular visibility management control - The software provides flexible view controls that allow us to seamlessly manage what information is hidden or exposed, enabling streamlined and friction-free alignment conversations with our clients.

Predefined estimation templates and rules - Apropo lets us build and catalog reusable templates complete with company quoting rules, allowing our teams to automatically generate accurate estimates for next project phases in moments.

Instant native Jira integration - The system effortlessly transforms final estimate modules into fully mapped Jira tasks and sprint backlogs within minutes, eliminating manual entry chores completely.

Apropo implementation has improved our pre-sales and delivery processes, in particular speeding up next iterations of the estimate and transforming the estimate into a Jira backlog.

What are the 3 top benefits you observed?

2.5x faster estimate creation

We minimized scoping friction across all developmental lifecycles to achieve 2.5x faster estimate creation.

Higher client engagement

Our proposals generated much higher client engagement by empowering prospects to clearly understand scope adjustments and iterations without data confusion.

4h less spent per sprint

By eliminating manual backlog generation at the close of the pre-sales cycle, our delivery team enjoys 4h less spent per sprint on admin tasks.

What are the 3 top Apropo features for you?

Export to Jira

The direct export to Jira functionality automatically turns pricing metrics into technical backlogs, saving our execution teams an average of 4 hours per sprint.

Visibility management

Using comprehensive visibility management allowed us to control what the information are displayed to the client, which massively speeds up transforming the quote into proposal.

Templates

Deploying rules-based templates completely accelerated our technical discovery workflows, leading to a 2.5x faster estimate creation process.

Do you recommend Apropo for other software agencies?

Absolutely. For any software development agency aiming to reduce operational risk, optimize sprint handoffs, and deliver highly transparent, interactive proposals that clients love, Apropo is a vital addition to the tech stack.