Welcome to Productive! As a manager or team lead, this checklist covers what you'll actually step into: managing budgets and time, handling approvals, using the Resource Planner, and connecting your tools.
📌 Productive is built around permissions, so what you see can differ from someone else's screen depending on their role. That's expected. Assigning and understanding user permission sets
New to Productive entirely, or setting up your organization? See Introduction to Productive for New Team Members or Productive Setup for Admins, our Academy courses.
A few things worth knowing early
The Sandbox: practice everything below without touching real data. Sandbox
Views: layouts, filters, and fields to organize how you see your team's work. Views in Productive
Finding things fast: use Search or Quick Add instead of clicking through menus. Search options · Quick Add
Deleted something by mistake: check the Recycle Bin before panicking. The Recycle Bin
From deal to project
Working with sales deals: track opportunities through your pipeline, from first contact to won. Managing a deal
What is a project: how a won deal becomes something your team actually works in. Projects overview
What is a budget: where the financial side of that project lives, services, rates, time, and expenses. What is a budget?
Planning your team's time
Using the Resource Planner: make high-level time allocations across your entire team. What is the Resource Planner?
Resource planning within a project: add a Resource Planning tab to a specific project to manage bookings and capacity in context. Resource planning in projects
Absence: request your own time off, and manage requests from your team. Requesting time off · Setting up absence approvals in Productive
Time and expenses, as a manager
Logging your own time: same as anyone else on your team. Manual time tracking
Reviewing your team's time: approve entries before they're recognized or billed. Approving time: overview
Logging and reviewing expenses: submit your own, and approve your team's. How to submit an expense · Expense approval
Invoicing your budget
Creating an invoice: turn tracked, approved work into something you can send. Creating and managing invoice drafts
Day-to-day project management
Working with tasks: your hub for what's assigned to you and your team. Creating a new task · Task screen overview
Automations: stop repeating the same manual steps after key events. Automations: general overview
Reports & dashboards: build and read the numbers that tell you how things are actually going. Reports overview · Creating project-specific reports · Dashboards in projects
Connect your tools
Calendar integrations: sync Google or Outlook with Productive. Integrating your Google calendar · Integrating your Outlook calendar
Meetings: once your calendar's connected, Productive can automatically record, transcribe, and summarize your video calls. About the Notetaker
Slack and Microsoft Teams integration: get updates where you already work. Slack integration: general overview · Microsoft Teams integration: general overview
Email inbox: as a manager, you likely have access to connect your own inbox and link conversations to deals, tasks, and budgets. Connecting your Gmail inbox · Connecting your Outlook inbox
Let the AI Assistant help
The AI Assistant can do most of what's on this list just by asking, no need to dig through menus. A few things worth knowing as a manager specifically:
Skills: save your team's reporting format, budget review criteria, or standard status update style as a Skill, so the Assistant applies it consistently every time instead of you re-explaining it in every conversation. Productive even ships a built-in Budgeting & Finance template library to start from. What are Skills? · How to create and manage Skills
Ask it to build a report, or an Artifact, a shareable visual output like a portfolio overview or status report, by describing what you want to see in plain language. What are Artifacts?
Connect it to your calendar, Slack, or inbox so it can act on them directly in a conversation. Connectors
Create and add an AI Agent to a project, budget, or deal as a team member, for example one that flags budgets nearing their threshold or drafts a weekly status update, so it's not something you have to remember to do yourself. AI Agents overview · Setting up and managing AI Agents
📌 The Assistant is connected to our Help Center and has insight into how things are set up in your workspace, so it can help with anything on this list, anytime, not just when you're stuck.
If you need an actual person, ask it to connect you with support, or click the ? icon in the top right to start a chat with our team directly.
Want the hands-on version? Our Academy course walks managers through this, step by step, with practice in the Sandbox.