Yggdrasil Gaming increased productivity by 37% with ClickUp

With new management at the helm, Yggdrasil Gaming was undergoing significant changes. One of those changes was making the shift to replace Jira, the company’s existing project and task management tool.

Jira’s rigid structure made it cumbersome to adapt on the fly and integrate new learnings from previous projects into the game development process. Yggdrasil was looking for a flexible solution that could give its engineering team the visibility and tools they needed to develop better products faster.

However, Yggdrasil knew that migrating complex game development processes to a new system without disrupting ongoing projects would be a challenge, as would overcoming resistance from nearly 200 engineers who were accustomed to Jira.

“Our business was transforming, so a lot of people were super busy. We didn’t want to put more pressure on them,” says Arturs Greiza, Process Engineer at Yggdrasil. So the company set out to make the transition as smooth as possible.

Yggdrasil Gaming decided to adopt ClickUp as its new productivity platform—a solution that Arturs has extensive experience implementing. The company took a phased approach to the implementation, starting new projects in ClickUp while the team finished existing projects in Jira. Yggdrasil was able to customize ClickUp templates and workflows to mirror familiar Jira processes, which eased the transition.

Since adopting ClickUp, Yggdrasil has experienced significant benefits.

Increased efficiency with end-to-end game development management

Thanks to the ability to develop a game from start to finish in ClickUp, Yggdrasil has saved $120,000 on total game development costs, boosted productivity by 37%, and reduced development-specific costs by 30%.

“Having a single platform like ClickUp where we can manage all aspects of game development has transformed both our collaboration and efficiency,” says Arturs.

ClickUp also enables the team to quickly implement new learnings that arise in the development process.

“To get those same changes made in Jira, a time-consuming overhaul by system experts would have been needed,” Alex says.

The switch to ClickUp has paid off. By utilizing formulas and weighted priorities in their Sprints, Yggdrasil is able to focus on what is most important and get games out faster.

Streamlining work for different stages of game creation

With ClickUp, Yggdrasil has centralized its customer request intake process. The requests are prioritized based on a custom feasibility formula considering revenue, maintenance, and project delivery costs.

“This is very important, because when everything’s urgent nothing really gets prioritized,” says Arturs. “ClickUp allows us to prioritize projects with ease.”

ClickUp Automations and ClickUp Brain, an AI tool, have also helped Yggdrasil streamline its regression testing and task management processes.

“We use ClickUp Brain frequently on the leadership team,” Alex says. “When we have a series of clear milestones, we ask it to generate the sub-tasks. It’s very useful, but I suspect we’re only scratching the surface now. We’re looking forward to exploring the tool more and leveraging more of its benefits.”

In addition, ClickUp List Views and Custom Fields make task ordering and batching for game development a breeze. The team can view tasks in customizable columns, drag tasks through phases, and batch them in subgroups to easily track projects.

Looking forward, Yggdrasil Gaming plans to continue improving its existing workflows in ClickUp based on engineers’ feedback.

The company also has its sights set on integrating both Google Workspace and Slack with ClickUp for greater collaboration. And Yggdrasil plans to further explore ClickUp’s AI tools to help with summarizing progress and generating project sub-tasks. All of these enhancements will support the company in its mission to exceed expectations with every new game it creates.