What Makes a Great Agency ClickUp Champion: The Complete Guide
Key Takeaways
- A ClickUp champion is the single owner of your ClickUp instance: the design, the team's habits inside it, and the go-to expert for questions. Every platform needs one, whatever the tool.
- Rule one at ZenPilot, no negotiation: the champion is never the owner or a leadership team member. They start with gusto and get pulled away from the daily, repeatable work.
- The champion needs thick enough skin to be a referee (someone moved a due date without a comment) and to manage up when a leader sends tasks in Slack instead of ClickUp.
- Plan for 20 to 30% of a project manager's or account manager's time, protected on the calendar. It's only a full-time role at very large agencies.
- Four cadences: daily spot checks and weekly roundups watch activity and inputs; monthly and quarterly reviews look at outcomes like profitability by client, department, and service line.
- When hiring, write the job description for an agency project manager who can train others on ClickUp, then run a show-and-tell exercise: have them document and teach you a real process.
Gray MacKenzie hosts this episode with his ZenPilot co-founder Andrew Dymski; there’s no outside guest. The two of them define a role that comes up in every ZenPilot implementation, the ClickUp champion, for two audiences: the person who just got handed the job without a job description, and the owner deciding who should have it. Gray asks the questions and adds his own criteria; Andrew lays out the selection rules, the cadences of the work, and how to hire for it.
A ClickUp champion owns the system, the habits, and the answers
Gray opened by asking Andrew for a definition.
A ClickUp champion is a singular point of contact in your organization who is the ultimate owner of your ClickUp instance. So this is someone who can take ownership over the overall design, the habits and behaviors that the team needs to execute inside the system. They understand all the moving parts, and they’re also a ClickUp expert, to be able to answer any questions or support teams as they’re working to utilize the platform.
Andrew said the same role exists whatever platform you run on. Asked what sets the best champions apart, he started with understanding and empathy: they’ve been on client calls, and they’ve sat in the fulfillment seat with the designers, writers, and developers.
The champions that we’ve seen really do well are those that have that customer understanding and that empathy with the team. But they’re also very detail oriented and very structured in their personalities. So they can bring those two things together and be the glue that holds… you could call it the demand side from clients and the fulfillment side.
Rule one: never the owner or a leadership team member
Andrew’s first selection criterion is a no-negotiation rule at ZenPilot.
We’ve seen it fail too many times. We’ve seen the owner start out with gusto, or even the director of operations start out with gusto. But once they get into the trenches and the mundane nature of this… that’s not for every personality type. There’s some personalities that thrive in that. They want to continuously improve every day and move those things forward, and others that they just have too much on their plate.
The champion needs leadership’s full backing, Andrew said, but it can’t be a leader, because the role gets derailed too easily. The other side of the rule is capacity. For most teams it’s a project manager or account manager giving 20 to 30% of their time, protected on the calendar for the daily check, the weekly roundup, and the monthly analysis. Only a very large team makes it a full-time job, and it can’t go to someone who’s already overloaded.
Thick skin: referee the team, and manage up
Andrew’s second criterion is about conflict.
The ClickUp champion needs to have thick enough skin to be a referee. And what that means is they need to be willing to call out teammates when they’ve violated the rules of engagement that the team has agreed to. And a classic example of that is someone moves a due date without leaving a comment on why they moved it. Or there’s a task floating that’s late that they haven’t updated the status around or haven’t updated the due date on.
Gray added a harder version of the same trait. The champion has to be willing to go to the people above them.
It’s got to be somebody who’s comfortable managing up. So my addition to that would be the person who’s comfortable going to someone who they perceive as higher than them in the organization, whether that’s the owner or someone in leadership team, and saying, and I’m just a lowly ClickUp champion, but you didn’t do this thing that we agreed that you would do. You sent these three people these tasks in Slack, and that actually needs to wind up in ClickUp.
Gray also wants someone who keeps a personal ClickUp sandbox and likes testing automations and Zapier integrations. He noted that doesn’t always come packaged with the traditional project manager, who often wants the process locked in for the next two years.
The four cadences: daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly
Gray walked through the rhythm of the job once the system is built and the champion is trained.
Both the daily spot check and the weekly roundup are largely centered around activity, the inputs into it, where monthly and quarterly is largely focused around the outcomes from that. How do we make better decisions moving forward based on the data that we’ve collected? So on a daily basis, I’m looking to make sure people are following the rules of engagement, and if there are any challenges, that I’m there to support and to hold them accountable.
Weekly is about trends: who’s over capacity in their time logs, which internal project to push back. Monthly and quarterly turn to profitability by client, project, department, and service line, which is why Gray adds “analytically minded” to the criteria: someone comfortable in a spreadsheet who can spot that estimated time for SEO has been way out of whack with actual time for three months running, and say whether the fix is pricing, process, or people.
Andrew layered four responsibilities across those cadences: managing the team’s engagement with the system, monitoring it (are tasks in the right place, built from templates, carrying the right custom fields, linked to the budget), maintaining it (bulk changes like a new custom field for a client’s franchise locations), and being the team’s go-to for ClickUp questions and new tricks.
How to hire one
Gray’s last question was how to find this person. Andrew said it’s rarely a full-time role, so you’re really writing a job description for an agency project manager, then adding that you run on ClickUp and want someone who can train others on it. Then test for it in the interview.
Having them document a process that they use in their real life and walk you through it, train you on their process, and look for two things. Look for how they communicate through it, how they teach their process, and also look at the level of detail that they put into their example project for you… Are they looking at due dates? Are they looking at time estimates? Are they looking at dependencies and mapping workflows and considering each step in a process?
Gray weights ClickUp experience less than Andrew does. In his experience, “I’ve got ClickUp experience” says very little about actual expertise, the way “HubSpot admin” did five or six years ago before that talent pool matured. He’d rather weight project management experience: you’ve worked in a platform, you can show an intelligent design, and ClickUp can be taught. Andrew’s closing line was that the role is worth the time and the dollars. Monitor the system daily, weekly, and monthly for a year and you’ll be blown away by where you are.