About Pearl Lemon

Pearl Lemon is a distributed services business running operations, delivery, and product enablement across SEO, lead gen, outreach, sales ops, and internal R&D for new product launches. Their work is high-tempo by default: multiple streams, constant context switching, and dozens of micro-projects moving in parallel across time zones.

They needed a system that could keep delivery structured without turning project management into a second job.

The challenge

Before Plane, Pearl Lemon’s work was spread across ClickUp, Notion, and ad-hoc spreadsheets. Individually, each tool worked. Together, they created noise.

The problem wasn’t “missing features.” It was overhead:

• Too many views, too many configurations, too many distractions
• Constant setup and maintenance to keep projects readable
• Planning and execution drifting into separate systems
• More internal messages and time spent on status updates to maintain alignment.

For a fast-moving agency, the tools became the primary obstacle.

Why Plane was the best fit

Pearl Lemon compared Plane against Linear, ClickUp, Asana, and Notion Projects.

• Linear felt great, but was too rigid for non-engineering teams.
• ClickUp had become too heavy.
• Asana was insufficiently robust for their delivery operations.
• Notion Projects was too free-form, and workflows dissolved into inconsistency over time.

Plane hit the middle ground: flexible enough for agency workflows, structured enough that work stayed coherent.

Speed: near-zero friction onboarding
They needed something teams could adopt quickly, without long setup cycles or a dedicated admin.

Clean hierarchy
Workspaces, cycles, and issues matched how their teams already operate. The structure felt obvious, not imposed.

Noise reduction
Fewer clicks, fewer rabbit holes, fewer views to maintain. The tool stayed out of the way.

Predictable pricing
They wanted pricing that remained sane as project loads and distributed teams scaled.

API and integrations
Integrations mattered for syncing updates into internal dashboards and outbound tooling.

Security and compliance
They needed GDPR-friendly practices, clear security documentation, permissions that work across teams, and SSO as a nice-to-have, with a preference for SOC 2 direction.

“It’s fast, clean, and opinionated in a way that helps you execute rather than configure."

- Deepak Shukla, Group CEO

Implementation and rollout

Pearl Lemon standardized onboarding in under a week. The first real shift came when the SEO pod started using Cycles to plan weekly deliverables. Work became visible end-to-end without turning the process into a configuration exercise.

What they rely on most

Pearl Lemon runs delivery with a small set of repeatable behaviors:

• Cycles to plan and run weekly delivery sprints
• Issue templates to standardize recurring work
• Views grouped by status and owner to keep standups and ops reviews tight
• Comments and lightweight docs to keep async updates and context inside the work

Integrations and extensions

Their setup is simple but connected: Slack notifications keep work visible without status chasing, GitHub sync supports internal dev work, Zapier automations push updates into reporting sheets, and a lightweight webhook creates tasks automatically from client onboarding forms.

A year on Plane

After more than a year, Plane has become Pearl Lemon’s default system for running delivery across operations, SEO, outreach, sales ops, and internal R&D.

Higher follow-through in cycles

With Cycles as the weekly backbone, completion rates are 35% higher across delivery teams. The difference was consistency: planning stayed lightweight, execution stayed visible, and cycles didn’t turn into overhead.

Faster handovers with less admin

Because work, owners, and updates live in one structured workflow, handovers that used to take hours often take minutes. Weekly ops review prep is ~70% lower, largely because teams aren’t rebuilding status from scratch.

Time savings that compound

Pearl Lemon is saving ~8-12 hours per week across ops and delivery through reduced admin, fewer status meetings, and fewer internal pings. Across ~20 people, that reclaimed time adds up quickly.

Fewer tools, less noise

Plane replaced ClickUp for project work, reduced Notion for task-level execution, and lowered Slack follow-ups as async comments became the default path for updates.