Welcome to ClickUp Weekly episode 4. My name is Gre McKenzie. I'm the founder at Zenpilot and we have a great show for you today. Let me take you real quickly through what we're going to cover here. Talk about release notes from ClickUp. We're going to go back over a quick timeline update that ClickUp sent out this week on ClickUp 4.0. Talk about some items on the wish list. We'll talk about ClickUp in the wild. How and where are users having success or running into challenges with ClickUp? And then we'll spend some time on trivia. Uh one of my favorite parts of the show. All right. As we're jumping in, let me share our disclaimer. ClickUp Weekly is presented exclusively by Zenpilot. This show is neither sponsored nor endorsed by ClickUp. Uh so this is my fault. This is not their fault. Um we are best friends until it comes to legal liability and then this is all on Zen Pilot's shoulders. Uh actually last week, so I'm a little bit under the weather right now and I was recording last week as well and uh hopefully this wasn't obvious in the edit that went out. I don't think it was too obvious, but I shared some stuff that I was not supposed to share in the recording. Um, so that is why this liability stuff matters. So anyways, uh, we will not do that this week. Let's go ahead and dive right in and let's start with release notes. So the change log, there is nothing new in the ClickUp change log. This week we are still uh, stuck here with a super agents takeover that we um, walked through last time we were together. Uh, and if you haven't seen that one, make sure that you're subscribed to the YouTube channel. Um, and you've got access to all of the ClickUp weekly episodes. So, we're gonna spend no time on the change log from this week in terms of what went out, but I do want to share a quick update here in our ClickUp Rewind segment, which is the 4.0 timeline update. So, this is a snippet from the message that got sent out to you if you're a workspace administrator this past week, and they said, "Hey," and they're reaching out specifically if one of your workspaces are still on the legacy ClickUp 3.0 layout uh for um other users in your work. It could be you, but it could be other team members as well. Here's what's changing. On February 27th, so just a couple weeks away, any workspace still on ClickUp 3 will automatically move to ClickUp 4.0 0 with the option to switch back and then one month later on March 27th, ClickUp 3.0 will be deprecated. All workspaces will be migrated to ClickUp 4.0. Here's the tough thing about this show. If you are watching this, you're probably already on ClickUp 4.0. Um, but if your entire team is not, I just want to call that out again and say, "Hey, here's the official uh timeline update. Um, and these dates uh are going to be um you know what what we're operating around." So, make sure if your team's not fully migrated to ClickUp 4.0 that you are. If you need any help uh with that migration or getting the most out of what's new in 4.0 and some of the new features that aren't even just for 4.0 features, um reach out to us here at Zenpilot. You can go to zenpilot.comcall and uh we can walk through your situation and help you uh improve what you're doing. Okay, this wish list item is uh about using ClickUp agents to work with other tools. So, this is one of the most powerful things. ClickUp uh AI is super powerful. Obviously, super agents are great. One of the big limitations, like the main reason right now to not use ClickUp AI for all everything that you're doing AI wise is because it doesn't have access to all the rest of your tools. So, if you're using Claude um you're using Cloud Code or Co-work or JustClaude like in the MCP connections or you're using uh chatpt or Gemini or some other tool, you're likely using that in concert with other tools that you um use as well. Well, so I think this is a super big step in that direction for ClickUp. Um, so I'll pull up the feedback uh forum here. And so different people had requested and upvoted and this was um just one of the tickets that had uh gotten um shared around this, but it said, "Hey, super agents can do almost all of what I would need a human employee to do. The main fly I see is that it can't create content or export it to Google Drive. The agents can draft emails and create events for Google. So the two-way integration is there. you just need to do the same for Google Docs and or Google Drive as it is. I have to create an annoying Zapier flow to facilitate this. So Jared uh makes a good point here that hey we already have a Google connection in place. Um you know I can use it with my calendar, I can use it with Gmail, but docs and um sheets I can't use yet. So um the update is this is in progress from ClickUp right now. Um and you'll be able to test this out uh before long here in the system. And this is going to be super helpful for a couple of main use cases. I think one of the ones that pops up all the time is how do I do um analysis of the time that my team is putting in? We're we're using ClickUp's time tracking feature, but I'm struggling with the reporting off of that or how do I integrate the profitability and utilization like how do I get profitability and utilization data out of this? We've built an entire solution for that. Um, and so you're welcome to reach out to us and talk about what we've built that lives natively inside of ClickUp, but if you're trying to do it uh on your own, kind of a DIY solution, um, then I think this is going to open up some stuff there. Uh, it's you're still going to need some like you're going to have to think through what's the right data structure, how do I make this all tie together, and how do I get up-to-date info? So, part of it is is the time tracking data accurate, that's got to be accurate. But on the other side, if we're talking about profitability or utilization, then um our team roster and then if we're talking about profitability, our cost basis, so what are our labor costs and then our revenue side, what are the contract values that we have and what are the dates that those stretch between. All those are super important as well. So there still are a lot of things that you have to hold in concert and make work together uh in the right way. But um this is going to open up um all kinds of different opportunities. Jared's specifically talking about like a content um based integration. So anybody who's doing any kind of marketing use case or reporting use case um or product requirement use case like this is going to also be super helpful for those type of use cases as well. And there's a million other things, but I just wanted to call out a couple specific ways that this is going to be helpful when it rolls out to get you thinking about that and hopefully start wetting the appetite for, oh yeah, when this rolls out, um, here's how I want to go start using it. All right, so that is an item that's been on our wish list here for a little while and I wanted to call that out because that's being built right now. Um, and so I'm very excited about that. I wanted to cover a couple things. ClickUp in the wild. So, what are real users um doing or having success with? And I actually pulled up something here that has nothing to do uh directly with ClickUp, and we'll cover that in a second, but I want to give a a big shout out to the team at Red Fork Marketing. Um Dave and the crew there are our first gold Zenpilot certified operator team of the 2026 calendar year. And so, what the heck is a Zen Pilot certified operator? Uh that's a great question. And while I'm talking through that, I want to pull up the Red Fork uh website and just give them a shout out here. Um because they've really like came into this with uh like, hey, we've got ambitious goals for what we're trying to do here as a business. Um and we've got some work to do to to build the infrastructure to be able to accomplish that. Um and they've taken this seriously and uh and push us in. If you are curious about unserious marketing um or everything Redfork Marketing, you can go here and uh find it at redformarketing.com. So, a ZenPilot certified operator, which is what I wanted to um highlight Red Fork for, is a team who's basically demonstrated their commitment and follow through uh to operating like a gold standard operator. Um so, there's a whole bunch of things that that means, but how do you get certified? It's a combination of three things. Like anything else, there's some amount of theory. So, we've talked about the Zenpilot methodology a little bit on this, but how do we understand like how does that play out? How does my methodology for how I'm going to run my business actually play out in all the details and does my team know that? So, the requirements there, we have the Zenpilot training center and we have courses in the Zenpilot training center that are built to be role specific. So, uh, instead of everybody having to go through every single piece of training, if you're an account manager, there's some training that you have to go through that a sales representative or a developer would not have to go through. If you're a project manager, there's some set of training that you would have to go through that someone else, uh, may not have to go to. So, it's role specific and there's six core courses in there. So um like most other certifications there is uh as a as a team you have to have completed those six core courses in the Zen pallet training center and so Redfork uh has done that. Um so that's the first one is kind of like have we gone through the theory? That's great. The second piece is we've got to demonstrate this by getting to a successful launch in ClickUp. So that's part two is like have we actually taken the time we've designed it. We've built it. We've trained the team. Now we've successfully launched in the system. And so we've done each of those four out of the five steps um that you need to do in the process. And then the last one where the rubber meets the road. And this is where the gold piece of this Zenpilot certified operator um thing shines is um what's what are the actual results out of the system. So, you may have, if you followed our content for a while, you've probably heard us talk a little bit about um the velocity ratio and compliance ratio and some of these different ratios that we're measuring. When we go in and look at your workspace, um there's some specific numbers that I want to see. And basically they're going to be a function to us or a function that that shows us uh how effective you are at planning out your work in advance um and then executing it consistently on the timeline that was projected and then how successfully you can manage uh the workload that's coming in over the course of a week as well. So, kind of how do you go from just the chaos that so many teams experience um to a level of clarity and clear operation um for your team so that everybody knows what to do, how to do it um and we're delivering high quality outcomes efficiently for our customers. Um and so there's a couple different benchmarks. You've got the ability to get certified as Empire certified operator. The first tier is silver um and second tier is gold. And uh Red Fork was the first team to reach uh the gold level um in terms of their actual like execution in ClickUp this year. So uh that is super exciting. If you're interested in becoming ZenPilot certified operator or becoming a ZenPilot certified operator, which um by the way that badge at some point in the future that will become more meaningful than it is today. uh the current number of ZMPLET certified operators uh we just rolled this out officially this certification uh program in the uh tail end of last year of 2025 and so I don't think the main appeal today is to clients um how much do will clients actually uh care about this you know this extra badge that you can put on your website uh that's not the primary appeal right now the three levels of impact out of this the first one is to ourselves. Hey, we've committed to taking this seriously. We're able to spec out what this will look like at the beginning and say this is how we would need to operate to achieve this to our own internal team right now and then have we committed and demonstrated the follow through to actually achieve that. That is far and away the biggest impact today. Uh the second level of impact will be uh folks who want to go to work at uh an organization that is uh demonstrated that ability and has earned the Zen pilot certified operator stamp of approval. Um and so I think secondly it'll be a recruiting thing and then I think far far distant in the future will be hey would this if there was is this if this grows enough um will this be a signal to our customers that the type of organization that we run you can depend on a certain level of quality consistently uh and consistency in the delivery that you'll expect from this team. And basically, I've talked a lot about this in the in the um past, the key relationship in a service-based business is the relationship between the sales team and the delivery team. So, who's making the promise and who's keeping the promise? And the whole idea of the Zenpilot Certified operator uh program is to say we are a team that keeps our promises. When we tell you we're going to do something, uh we will deliver it. Um and that's true for our customers. So they understand, hey, when I'm buying uh, you know, off this menu of services and I'm buying a website or I'm buying a branding engagement or I'm doing all three with Red Fork Marketing that I can expect to get um what I came in for. But this should be true to the internal team as well that hey, the level of commitment, the things that we're asking of you and the promises that we're making to you, we also keep those. So we have a sane system to run this business. Um, and it's not going to be our hairs on fire all the time. I think the most important promise by the way is to ourselves. Like how effectively do we make promises to ourselves and then keep promises to ourselves. I'm going to run a business that operates in this way. Can I actually execute that or not? Is probably the most important of the three and the one that we think about the least. Okay. So, I wanted to make sure we gave the Red Fork team uh a shout out there. Then I'd love to dig into this Reddit thread with ClickUp's PM of the Super Agents team. And so I thought I had it linked up there, but I think I still have it open. Um, so Michael Van Dornne, MVD at ClickUp, uh, has been with the team for a while. I pulled up his LinkedIn profile because I think this is super cool to see this. Hopefully this is a little bit inspirational to you. This is exciting, uh, to see from my side. Um, so you know, five years ago, five plus years ago, coming in as a as a customer support specialist and doing good work time over time, over time over time, uh, rolling into really key product management functions. Uh, Michael, I want to give you a shout out for the work that you've done at ClickUp and impact that you've had. Uh, you've got plenty of fans here on the Zen Pilot team. Um, but ClickUp had a Reddit AMA uh, with Michael. So, ask me anything. This happened here about two weeks ago. Um, and so, uh, there was a bunch of questions on here and I just want to shout it out and say, hey, some of these are worth, um, highlighting for you and some of these you may want to dig in a little bit deeper. I think the most popular one was like, hey, how does ClickUp use super agents um, internally? And so, this is pretty cool. Like the ask people pal, which obviously has a lot of use cases. This is really about internal HR ops. So, if someone submits a specific form in ClickUp, the agent reviews or responds to help answer those questions. Um, this is super cool to see in ClickUp. This has been available through integrations like I think HR tools hit this pretty early um in their Slack bots uh and and worked on building this. So, this is cool to see this kind of stuff happening inside ClickUp now and really no difference uh between between two different tools. Now, we just got it centralized in ClickUp. Uh regression tester is helpful. Uh the meeting notes courier decision capture agent. I think this is one that most organizations should have is uh hey do we make a decision here or do we not make a decision? I actually think decision capture and then like a decision forcer is equally helpful. So you might want to think about this as an idea. So can we capture and just log and I like to keep this uh I think a dock is fine. I think a channel also works for this, but a docu in many ways uh is just easier to go back and edit at a at a later date. Um so I think logging them uh in a uh in a doc is great for u capturing decisions saying, "Hey, we did decide that we were going to dep prioritize this and rep prioritize this. That's now all reflected in our uh task load." Um and now every everybody else who needs to know that is looped in and aware of it. I think a decision forcer. How many times do you have that situation where like we either call an actual meeting or it's not a meeting, but it's a, you know, we're chatting back and forth, everyone's like, "Yeah, what's the issue? What's the issue?" We're kind of poking around it, but we don't actually solve that. It's like, "Yeah, yeah, that's a beefy problem. Like, we should come back to that at some point." And then two weeks later, you come back to it again, and you still don't solve it. So, I think using an agent to say, "Hey, this issue's popped up before." Um, or, "Hey, did we actually make a decision here?" uh in the original thread is super helpful. So that's another idea I would throw out and tag out of this uh from Michael that may be helpful for you. Uh called out a couple others. So David is more of a um you know up uh product manager specific uh role I think an executive daily co-pilot um is cool. Mark Somerville shared this week. Uh I probably should have pulled that up, but shared about like an email triage uh agent and walked through the process of building that. Um Mark also works at ClickUp. Uh and so this is like you know that that what Mark shared is a subset of um what Michael's sharing here. Agents team intelligence. So, hey, what is uh kind of like reviews all the teammates that are on that specific team um and then update those. So, uh I think this is kind of a a cool concept. Um so, anyways, those are a couple ideas. I thought that was a good question asked by uh personal day 8182 days ago. Good job. And then this won't surprise you. We've touched on this already, but hey, how do we deal with pricing? like this popped up a couple different times on here. So, this will be the second one that I'd call out is I realize this is a tough uh situation to figure out. Um I don't think that it was here. I don't think it was in this thread, but um in some discussion around ClickUp pricing as they're doing some research, you know, they're trying to figure out, hey, how would we if this was not on a teamwide basis? Right now, if you sign up for ClickUp AI, you've got to buy it for your team. So if you've got 50 people in your organization and there's four of you who want to use ClickUp AI, you've got to pay for 50 people and um that's creating friction in teams actually getting signed up for ClickUp AI. Now the is is the reality like all 50 of those people should be trained and uh pulled and pushed into hey here's how you can use AI to accelerate your workspace and it's or accelerate uh your productivity uh in your workspace and um here's how that's going to so easily um have a positive ROI. Absolutely they should. But that's not where most teams are at. And if you're looking at buying this and you know you've got you're running your own small fivep person team in this 50 person organization you're not necessarily the person uh in a position to say hey well everybody's got to start adopting this right now. So ClickUp understands that realizes there's friction there. And the flip side is well if we let you buy it for five people but then you are running you know some AI tool that goes and uh assigns stuff and it's going to assign people beyond those five uh people or it's going to you know search through activity uh for other folks or it's doing it's doing basically um actions that uh impact other users. Well then how many users should you be paying for? So there there just are some challenges uh with how this gets built out. than do we go to everything is credit based and it's purely a usage uh thing and ultimately we're going to get as close as we can um in the ecosystem as a as a whole not even just ClickUp but all these tools are going to get as close as they can to value based pricing and hey did you actually get real value out of this then you're actually going to pay and if you got more value you're going to pay more and if you got less value you'll pay less but we're still early in figuring out this whole pricing thing so anyways I wanted to call this one um because I think this is a cool idea to do ask me anything and share them. I would love to I I realize the benefit of not doing it live. I'd love to see some of these done uh live. I think that's, you know, that's like the the stuff you get your popcorn out for and get excited to watch people be put on the spot. I would love to do uh we got to figure out how to edit and do all this stuff and run ClickUp Weekly totally live, but I'd love to run it live because that just brings a different um I just a different level to it. Um which is fun. So, I'd love to see some of this stuff uh done live in the future as well. Okay, then I wanted to pull this up. So, um BRCG, what is BRCG? That is a great question. Um, so this is an agency out of Charlottesville, Virginia. Um, and Cody and Henry, a couple friends from the Charlottesville, uh, area, have grown this and are just doing something really exciting in the space. They're running on ClickUp as well. Um, they are clients of Zen Pilot and have done a really impressive job in just building us out. Cody posted on LinkedIn about how they rebuilt this website. He said it was a weekend project. Uh, I haven't talked to him yet to figure out, hey, was it exactly a weekend project? Is this a long weekend project or is this a multi-week project? You know how this stuff goes, but they were on WordPress before, I would imagine. Um, a number of you watching have a WordPressbased website and built this on top of Lovable and built it out. So, this is not uh ClickUp specific. This is just AI related. I think this site I was clicking through some of it. I haven't gone through everything yet, but um it looks pretty clean. Um they have a lot of resources. I was like, "Oh, they probably just don't have a blog or careers or different uh you know, stuff on here." And um anyways, it looks great. So, I appreciated that Cody did a uh put out a blog post about it and talked about specifically um like, hey, why did they use Lovable? I think that's kind of helpful. Um, and then like you know what what are some of the concern points and what would we do differently now that we've gone through it? Uh, Cody, by the way, I haven't asked you this yet, but I would assume as I read this I was like, oh, I think this was also like half AI generated. Um, and so I'm curious if the process was like, hey, I'm going to record a quick video. I'm going to feed it into Claude or into whatever and then have it write it or, you know, click a brain and have it have it write this out. But anyways, uh I still thought that the core of the content was helpful here. So I just want to call that out. I would imagine a number of you have done that or are thinking about it and so I just wanted to give a quick shout out to the kind of the broader um AI space and how that might apply to you as you work through this too. Okay, so those are three components that I wanted to cover here for ClickUp in the wild. Uh let's go to trivia time. So last week I asked you these three questions. said, "Clickup was originally built as an internal tool before being released to the public, but in what year did the company get its first paying customer?" Drum roll, please. If you answered 2017, you were correct. 2017 uh towards the tail end of 2017 uh was the first paying customer coming into ClickUp. Um and that was right as I was getting around getting my hands in it and playing with it for the first time. Second question, this had nothing to do with ClickUp. What's the only food that never go never goes bad? If you answered honey, you're correct. Uh there are stories of honey being unearthed uh 3,000 years later and still being edible, still being totally fine. Uh I don't know whether I buy that or don't buy that, but enough places on the internet said this is the only food that never goes bad. And I heard this uh from the son of a friend recently and I was like, you know what, we'll highlight that. All right. And the last question from last week was, "What do you call the plastic tip at the end of a shoelace?" And if you answered Egglett, congratulations, especially if you got all three. Uh, that was correct. Uh, I think most of these today are plastic, but I've got a handful of those metal ones. They've come in handy a couple different times. And this comes from the French meaning little needle. So, makes it uh last longer and makes it easier to lace up. So, uh those are my three funny questions. Again, another friend uh shared that one and uh and now you know. Now you cannot forget what that plastic tip at the end of the shoelace is called. Should have said plastic or metal. All right, you ready for this week's trivia? Which MLB team and ClickUp partner shares a backyard with ClickUp? On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the most difficult and one being the easiest, this is about a one and a half. I don't even think it's a two. This is about as easy as it gets. So, drop it in the comments. Which mob team and ClickUp partner shares a backyard with ClickUp? All right, that's it for trivia time this week. It's a short and sweet one. Um, as always, if you'd like to get involved with ClickUp Weekly, there's three things I'd ask of you. One, subscribe on YouTube. Answer the trivia questions. Uh, leave a comment with any questions or answers that you have. Two, if you'd like to be involved, we'll be doing more live sections of ClickUp in the wild. So, email show@zenpilot.com if you would like to be involved um and do some content for that together. And then three, subscribe to firstclass operations, get early access to the ClickUp 4.0 playbook. You can go to zenpilot.com/newsletter. As a reminder, ClickUp Weekly is presented exclusively by Zenpilot is neither sponsored nor endorsed by ClickUp. Thank you so much for spending time with me here this week on ClickUp Weekly. Um and I'm excited to dig in next week with more updates and great content around the world of ClickUp. All right, see you next time.