Two years of Monday.com. Two people ever used it.
Bengo Media produce podcasts for brand clients. They paid for Monday.com for two years, two of the team used parts of it, and everything that actually ran the business sat in spreadsheets only the owner could open. He scrapped it. What replaced it is shaped around how podcast production works, and how Bengo works on top of that.
The situation
Every show is a production line: record, edit, artwork, show notes, marketing, launch. Each of those steps has an owner, a deadline and a dependency on the one before it. Get it wrong and the launch date moves.
They had Monday.com, and had been paying for it for two years. Two people used it, and only parts of it. Alongside it the owner kept a set of spreadsheets nobody else could see, which is where the real state of play actually lived. Eventually he got fed up and scrapped the whole thing.
The tool was not the problem and neither were the people. Off-the-shelf workflow software is one size fits all. It works when somebody is there to build the framework inside it and keep it alive. Without that it tries to be all things to all people, and ends up being not much to anyone.
Podcast production has its own nuances, and Bengo has more on top of those. The usual answer is to reshape the business to fit the software. This way they did not have to.
What I did
Built the framework first
Five production types, each with its own task sequence and its own timings counted back from launch day. The most complex runs to eight phases and separates one-off series setup from the tasks that repeat every episode. That framework is the bit generic software leaves you to invent for yourself.
Built to the team, not the org chart
Every screen answers one question someone actually asks: what's mine this week, where is this episode, who has capacity. Nothing was included because a competitor had it.
Worked on the practice, not just the tool
A new HR handbook alongside the build, and a fair amount of getting Steve to actually hand off the things a tool alone was never going to fix for him.
What it does
- Podcasts, episodes and tasks in one place
- Automated task lists per production type
- Personal task views, so nobody hunts for their own work
- Kanban and Gantt at the same time, because he wanted the Gantt and the team needed Kanban
- Batch episode creation for a whole season at once
- One-off bespoke projects and repeating podcast tasks in the same system
- Generates outbound emails when something lands on you
- Team capacity visibility
- Auto-calculated deadlines, counted back from launch date
Where it stands
It has been in beta with the team since August 2026. The real test was never the launch, it is whether people are still opening it in six months, and that evidence is still coming in. The honest position is that this one is built around the reason the last one went unused.
of paid Monday.com licence, for a tool two people opened
people it has to work for, not just the founder who commissioned it
ongoing licence cost
[FROM STEVE, once the team has had it a while and he has felt the difference. Worth waiting for: a quote about a tool nobody has lived with yet says nothing.]
Got a system nobody uses?
Usually the tool isn't the problem. Start with the diagnostic and we'll find out what is.