7:00 a.m. is early for most people, but not to the LevelUp attendees walking into the Rady Shell at Jacobs Park venue one by one. It was the quintessential weather in San Diego, and music began to play from the stage.
The Rady Shell in San Diego on November 9th, 2021
CREDIT: David Jon Photography
On November 9th, ClickUp hosted their second annual productivity conference, LevelUp. Over 45,000 people worldwide registered to learn how today’s leaders redefine productivity with powerful new work tools and strategies. 💡
Thank you for spending the day with us both in person and virtually! We hope you took away actionable insights and learnings to help you get closer to your productivity goals. 💪
If you missed the LevelUp event, we got you covered! Here are the top ten highlights.
This Article Contains:
- 10. Six ClickUp Coaching Sessions 🏆
- 9. ClickUp’s Chief Creative Officer Melissa Rosenthal on Creating In-House Brand Campaigns 💡
- 8. Command Center Replaces QuickSwitch ⚡️
- 7. Announcing: ClickUp Verified ✔
- 6. Clickup Docs Are Redesigned and More Powerful Than Before 💪
- 5. Speaker Highlights We’re Still Talking About 🎤
- 4. Announcing: When It Clicked Podcast 🎙
- 3. Announcing: ClickUp University 🎓
- 2. Whiteboards in ClickUp: “Ship It” 🛳
- 1. Zeb’s Vision for 2022 🌠
- You Asked… and TBH, So Did We 🎶🦄
The countdown begins to LevelUp by ClickUp
CREDIT: David Jon Photography
Summarize this article for me please10. Six ClickUp Coaching Sessions 🏆
Our Coaches and Customer Success Managers joined the stage to answer top questions from our users and walked through a diverse range of untapped ClickUp features. They did not hold back on sharing their ClickUp customization knowledge, and we love them for it! 🙌
🎥 Master the ClickUp Hierarchy
Thomas Miller teaches how to use Spaces, Folders, and Lists to set up your Workspace for peak productivity
🎥 “Hidden” ClickUp Hacks
Logan Spencer explores some of the best features that you may not be using and level up your ClickUp experience
🎥 Time-Saving Templates
Haven Gumucio shares how to avoid recreating the wheel every time you start a new project
🎥 All About Views
Dina Saunders uncovers the magic of customizing ClickUp’s flexible views so you can work most efficiently
🎥 Is Business Plus Right for You?
Jennifer Jones dives into best practices to leverage ClickUp’s new Business Plus Plan to scale and administrate
🎥 Finding the Right Administrator for Your Workspace
Tim Short shares insights to find your perfect ClickUp Workspace administrator
Summarize this article for me please9. ClickUp’s Chief Creative Officer Melissa Rosenthal on Creating In-House Brand Campaigns 💡
Where were you when you first experienced a ClickUp ad? 💻🚌✈️
ClickUp’s Chief Creative Officer Melissa Rosenthal pulls back the curtain to reveal how our marketing campaigns, editorial, and events are created and delivered—all within ClickUp!
“We’re going to debut a very special new series we’re excited to share with you today that was created entirely in ClickUp,” Melissa says. “That’s right. Everything—the ideation, insights, production, execution, revisions—I can go on and on. It was all created and managed in ClickUp.”
From the wild team that brought you Returning to Work, Abedatool, and Work App Overload Haunting Your Dreams? campaigns, Melissa shares her ClickUp tips for creating brand campaigns in-house:
- Add and remove assigned team members from tasks as the project enters different phases
- Create custom statuses to plan the project lifecycle
- Leverage subtasks to monitor all project dependencies
- Assign comments to an individual or team when assets are ready for review
- Create a Calendar view to organize publishing dates
Melissa gives an inside look on how ClickUp campaigns are done in-house
Summarize this article for me please8. Command Center Replaces QuickSwitch ⚡️
What can save you clicks, perform everyday actions, and find items without taking your hands off the keyboard?
The Command Center in ClickUp!
Available on all plans, the Command Center is the (first) place to search and navigate through your Workspace.
Our favorite actions already are Search task comments, Open my Work, and Open Calendar . 🤩
Summarize this article for me please7. Announcing: ClickUp Verified ✔
Top users in ClickUp will receive a ClickUp Verified Check!
How do you become verified? 💭
- Become a power user: You’ll automatically become Verified if you’re in the top 1% of active ClickUp users—so keep up the productivity!
- Promote ClickUp as a social ambassador: Shout us out on social, share our content, and spread the word of ClickUp to become eligible for verification
- Help others as an expert: Down the road, we’ll have new opportunities for certifications and badges for admins and ClickUp consultants who’d like to dive deeper into ClickUp
⭐️ Learn more in our ClickUp Verified FAQs.
Summarize this article for me please6. Clickup Docs Are Redesigned and More Powerful Than Before 💪
Brian Shen, Director of Product, Work Management at ClickUp, explains how users can work with Docs in more flexible ways:
“Docs can also be the final deliverable… You may be a consultant that’s working with a client to kick off an engagement. And you’re using Docs as your statement of work.”
Brian continues, “Not only do you want it to be on brand, but you also want to bring more transparency to the process by bringing in the actual tasks your team will be working on. And so, we listened to you, and we decided to make Docs even more powerful.”
ClickUp’s product leaders Brian Shen and Zach Blodget demo the newest game-changing features in ClickUp
CREDIT: David Jon Photography
🎥 Watch all the incredible new features added to ClickUp Docs here.
Summarize this article for me please5. Speaker Highlights We’re Still Talking About 🎤
🎥 Organizational Psychologist Adam Grant on The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know
In 2018, Adam Grant pitched a Remote Friday experiment to a handful of CEOs. He shared extensive studies that showed that as long as people are in the office half the week, they can be more productive, satisfied, less likely to quit, and there’s no cost to collaboration. 🤝
The pitch didn’t go well with the CEOs. They were convinced that culture would fall apart and employees would procrastinate. Years later, a “global experiment no one consented to” forced organizations to shift to remote work. Today, many of those leaders have now committed to being remote or hybrid first.
Adam Grant shares insights about how we can be quicker to think again in a rapidly changing world:
- Think like a scientist to improve your quality of decision making (don’t let your ideas become your identity)
- Three reasons why group brainstorming does not work:
- Production blocking: some ideas get lost, and we all can’t talk at once
- Ego threat: we hold back on our original ideas
- Conformity pressure: instead of a diversity of thoughts, a bunch of “groupthink”
- Try “brainwriting”: give people the problem in advance to generate their ideas independently, which provides variety, quantity, and quality
- We have to be thoughtful about the dynamic between asynchronous or synchronous communication to get everyone on the same page before project planning
- Make time for informal interactions to seek tips from people outside your department and learn something different
- One of the ways to fight Zoom fatigue is finding times where cameras can be turned off to remove image pressure
- Rethink “best practices” by inviting everyone to test out better practices
Adam Grant expands on getting in the zones of deep work and separate periods of “burstiness”
CREDIT: David Jon Photography
🎥 ClickUp’s Senior Coaching Manager Holly Peck on How to Connect Projects and Manage Tasks Across Teams
Holly Peck demonstrates how task relationships keep teams connected in three use cases:
- Streamlining a pass off on a sales deal towards training
- Vendor management best practices to prevent teams from resorting to spreadsheets
- How backlinks can help your team associate the task they’re working on with the company OKRs (objective and key results)
“I would highly encourage you to step in there, be inspired, connect all of your tasks together, and create your own magical plate of spaghetti, powered by task relationships,” says Holly.
Hello, task relationships. Goodbye, spreadsheets. 👋
Holly Peck describes how project management is never simple
Related Productivity & Ops sessions:
- 🎥 How to Customize your Workspace and Make Your Work Work for You
- 🎥 Saving Time: How to Prioritize and Structure Your Day to Get the Most Out of Your Time
- 🎥 From Marketing Rockstar to Self-Employed CEO: Creating New Opportunities With Familiar Tools
🎥 Spotify’s Head of Client Partnerships, Brad Grealy on Managing a Modern Sales Organization
Brad Grealy shares his advice about what to do when a prospect has ghosted you:
“You have to think about all the noise that people are dealing with at any given time right now. All of us are in information overload, so we have to be really careful about where we pick and choose to apply our attention and focus. So you got somebody that’s disappeared on you. Well, you have to do something different and switch it up.”
He suggests:
- Adding a personal touch by sending a quick 15-second clip to introduce yourself
- Crafting your offering to address their needs. What is the value you’re creating to give their attention to you?
- Ensuring you’re articulating your message in a clear and concise way
- Standing out from the crowd
Other session highlights:
- For training new sales team members in a virtual onboarding environment, it’s important to have:
- A robust and accessible library of information
- Peer to peer training with someone already in that role where the new team member can feel safe to ask questions
- Motivators in a sales organization (aside from financial compensation) can include:
- Building a team culture where everyone feels they have a role in the larger mission and rely on each other to be successful
- Opportunities within the organization (career path or interest in a specific area of expertise)
Brad Grealy says, “What you do today is going to come around months later”
Related Sales sessions:
- 🎥 The Key to Seamless Internal Deal Collaboration with ClickUp
- 🎥 How to Boost Revenue by Creating Your Own CRM
🎥 ClickUp’s Managing Editor Erica Chappell on How to Run a Successful Content Program with ClickUp
As ClickUp’s first marketing hire two years ago, Erica Chappell reflects on why a content program begins with people management:
“One of the biggest takeaways I’ve learned for myself going from a team of me—as far marketing goes—to a team of 11 between designers, developers, and writers is that people want to know why their work matters.”
She continues, “They’ll feel inspired, encouraged, and willing to put in extra hours when they know what they’re working on ladders up to overall company objectives, mission, and growth. When they don’t see that, it’s not encouraging to want to put in the extra time and ultimately grow professionally. They’ll start seeking opportunities elsewhere.”
- Scalable content teams do this:
- Create a single source of truth for planning, creating, and tracking
- Slow down and prioritize quality and quantity
- Reduce errors and give the team room to be creative by automating current manual processes
- Make learnings accessible to all
- Build process in conjunction with other teams that align to shared objectives
Other session highlights:
- Goals in ClickUp are high-level containers that break down your objectives into small, measurable targets
- Use a collaborative Doc for 1-1 meetings to discuss what’s working well, where there’s room to grow, and takeaways for progress
- Host monthly cross-functional team brainstorms to get out of the weeds and think about what’s working well, what’s progressing, and how you can make it better
- Connect with other teams on their OKR progress for the quarter to determine any adjustments needed with yours
Erica Chappell discusses the timeline of ClickUp’s growing content team
Related Marketing session:
🎥 The San Diego Padres’ VP of Info Tech, Ray Chan on Leveling Up IT Operations with ClickUp
We asked Ray Chan about what their department’s workflow looks like on the ClickUp mobile app.
“Especially if you’re in the Engineering department and there are certain things you have to get done, you’re not going to lug around a tablet all the time,” he begins.
“You fire up your company-issued phone, open up your ClickUp app, and all the instructions are there. If you’re not done with a particular job, you can leave notes on what else needs to be done, so then it can be re-assigned if necessary or pull in another resource.”
Other session highlights:
- ClickUp is a platform that can transform a department based on the customizations as they see fit
- There is always a use case in each department that ClickUp can help to organize them a lot better
- When you come to work for the Padres, ClickUp is the foundational tool that will help you get your job done faster and more efficiently
“We see our fans come into the ballpark, and it reminds us this what we’re here for: to bring them in and give them a unique experience. So how do we manage that experience for them the best way we can? ClickUp is going to help us do that for years to come.”
Ray Chan talks about how easy it is for the Padres Operations teams to use the ClickUp mobile app on and off the ballpark
CREDIT: David Jon Photography
Related Productivity sessions:
- 🎥 How STANLEY Security Transformed Into a Self-Directed Organization Using ClickUp
- 🎥 The Key to Leveling Up Your Operations: A Fireside Chat with Matt MacInnis, COO of Rippling
🎥 Front’s Head of Platform Vrushali Patil on Keys to Scaling Engineering Teams
Vrushali Patil shares her advice on introducing new processes to the team and organization:
“When you think about processes, you want to do things where it’s just enough for the organization. Just enough to solve the current problem. And then, as you go, you solve the next problem. You don’t over-engineer it too much because that can disrupt the flow and how things go.
Vrushali dives deeper. “Usually, at startups, there is a certain amount of flexibility in how things are done. People take on different responsibilities; they wear different hats, which is one reason why startups succeed. And you don’t take all that magic out and just introduce a lot of rigor everywhere to make things efficient.”
Session highlights:
- As a leader, you should have a good understanding of the team technology so that you can make the right decisions as you go along
- When you’re introducing new processes, start with making tiny tweaks to assess how they’re working, then propel larger changes forward
- A company culture fit indicator is a candidate that comes from companies with a similar philosophy as your organization
“You want to make sure that every team has an area where they feel a sense of ownership. That they are empowered to own or make all the decisions in. It’s exciting and challenging… and it’s something that will stretch the team. There’s another aspect of the charter which is every team, and every organization has technical debt.”
She continues, “That will be part of every team, but you don’t want to saddle one team with technical debt and have one team that is doing everything new. So for every team you have, you usually want to balance the amount of technical debt they’re handling with something exciting they can look forward to.”
Vrushali Patil shares the importance of planning before hiring
Related Development sessions:
- 🎥 A Modern Approach: Better Agile Planning with ClickUp
- 🎥 Sprinting to Success: How to Run a First-Class Development Team on ClickUp
🎥 Skateboard Icon, Entrepreneur, and Investor Tony Hawk on Master of Skating to Master of Business Productivity
Tony Hawk talks about the early days of skateboarding gaining traction, the Skateboarding Project, choosing your circle, and saying “no.”
- What will have the most reach and impact when deciding where to focus your time and attention?
- Be transparent about the things you do and causes that are important to you
- From an athlete perspective, if you’re doing what you truly love and make a living doing it, there are different trajectories for your career path
Tony Hawk answers what makes people go from pro to champion to Hall of Fame:
“I’d like to think it’s perseverance… usually the window of a pro-skater is very short-lived because you only have so many years when you’re really doing your best. And at some point, your skills or interest start to fade. So if you’re willing to push through that and maybe shift gears—do it in a different style or whatnot—you can make it beyond that sweet spot of what people think is four or five years.”
Tony Hawk shares the moment he rode the inaugural skateboarding course at the Tokyo Olympics venue
CREDIT: David Jon Photography
Summarize this article for me please4. Announcing: When It Clicked Podcast 🎙
We’re looking forward to beginning 2022 with our favorite things—traveling and the launch of ClickUp’s “When It Clicked” podcast.
Subscribe to our podcast on your preferred platform here! 💡
Summarize this article for me please3. Announcing: ClickUp University 🎓
ClickUp University is a free online learning platform for ClickUp admins and members to master the fundamentals of ClickUp quickly. Each course is packed with on-demand lessons, activities, and tips.
Create your account here and mark your calendars for the first day of class: December 1st! 🗓💻
Summarize this article for me please2. Whiteboards in ClickUp: “Ship It” 🛳
Who saw that coming? 😳
The Whiteboards feature slated to release “soon,” but we were all surprised when Zeb walked on stage and said, “ship it.”
Zeb continued, “Virtual whiteboarding is key to our vision of a connected workspace in a single platform. It’s freeform thinking at its finest.”
Zeb interrupts Brian and Zach to release Whiteboards Beta officially
CREDIT: David Jon Photography
Add a Whiteboard view inside your ClickUp Workspace today!
🎥 Watch Zach demo the ClickUp Whiteboards capabilities here.
Summarize this article for me please1. Zeb’s Vision for 2022 🌠
🚀 Hybrid work
“Roughly 80% of our company is remote today. We are representing this new shift to hybrid work, and we believe that’s where the future of work is headed. So we’re super excited and humbled to enable people to increase the adoption of this shift to this hybrid remote experience. And that’s been our mission since day one.”
Zeb explains, “Like ClickUp, the LevelUp event connects people around the world”
CREDIT: David Jon Photography
🚀 The problem we are solving
“People are wasting time between so many different applications. And on top of that, with the pandemic, we’re also seeing people sprawl. Teams are working from anywhere and everywhere, which is awesome! But the result is that work is more disconnected than ever before, which means that collaboration is hard. Alignment is hard. There’s no visibility into what people are doing. And so productivity as a whole is slowing down. And our aim at ClickUp has always been to solve these problems.”
Zeb shares, “The world has changed, but the problem we’re solving is the same”
CREDIT: David Jon Photography
🚀 The ClickUp vision
“Our vision from day one has been one single place for all of your work. One platform that works for everyone and everything. A platform that saves you time and makes you more productive. This is what we believe is the future of work, and this is what ClickUp is today. It’s the world’s only all-in-one productivity platform.”
Based on user surveys, ClickUp has collectively saved 208 million days last year and added productivity and efficiency
CREDIT: David Jon Photography
🚀 ClickUp raises $400M Series C
“This new round of funding will enable us to move faster. It will enable us to build the platform of scale and reliability that our customers deserve and demand. And it will enable us to continue scaling our teams.”
Zeb says, “With this new funding, we can deliver on the promise we made since day one”
CREDIT: David Jon Photography
🚀 Future product announcement: Universal Search
“For the first time, you can search within ClickUp, and you can search everything outside of ClickUp… over 50 different applications outside of ClickUp—Salesforce, Slack, Gmail, Hubspot… This feature will undoubtedly save you more time than we have in the past.
🚀 “Grow 1% Every Day”
“We aren’t perfect yet, but I promise we are growing in every way we can to get there. And growth is our most important core value at ClickUp. I fundamentally believe that growth produces happiness. I’m not just talking about growth in your business or work, but also in your personal, health, relationships, everything—growth is equivalent to happiness. And so, we have to remember to make choices along the way that will allow us to grow. But as we grow, we also have to remember to enjoy the process.“
Zeb talks about ClickUp’s Core Values
CREDIT: David Jon Photography
🎥 Watch Zeb’s full presentation here.
Summarize this article for me pleaseYou Asked… and TBH, So Did We 🎶🦄
1️⃣ The Spotify playlist with ClickUp original music from DJ Rod Wade‘s set (courtesy of one of our own, Joey Cox!)
Rodney McMahon, ClickUp’s Post-Production Supervisor and DJ at LevelUp, welcomed virtual and in-person attendees to the event
CREDIT: David Jon Photography
2️⃣ ClickUp Swag Store coming in February 2022!
Let us all manifest that this ClickUp suit will be available at launch. 💫
We’re already thinking about next year’s LevelUp event and can’t wait to be back with you.
Until then, try out the new ClickUp features and subscribe to our newsletter for more exciting updates! ✨
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