It learned to question its meetings and cut project overrun from 30% to 15%

Sixty projects at once, and a detail that always slipped away

"Today we run 60 projects at once," says Nicolás García, Director of Consulting and Implementations at Mandü. "Sixty active, plus sixty customers we're servicing. All that volume, with a big team but a limited one."

In his world, selling doesn't end at signature: that's when the real work starts. Implementing an HR solution inside a customer takes sharp, sustained listening, above all in the initial discovery — the month-long stage where the real needs surface. "Listening is critical, from the consultant to the PM, to keep catching needs as they come up," he explains.

The problem wasn't the will to listen. It was the physical impossibility of being everywhere. With that many projects and that many people, there were meetings nobody could attend live, stakeholders who weren't available at the right moment, conversations whose detail was tied to a single person's memory. Whatever wasn't retained was lost. And an incomplete discovery is a project that starts out crooked.

"I want in on that project"

Samu was already circulating in the company, on the sales side. Nicolás saw it working and immediately recognized what it could do for his team. "We said: I want in on that project," he recalls. What was, for sales, a way to capture what happened in a meeting was, for him, technical backup for the kind of listening his operation could no longer guarantee through human presence alone.

A meeting you can ask questions

The moment Nicolás understood what Samu was about wasn't a feature demo. It was realizing he could ask a meeting questions.

"The good part, the innovative part for us, wasn't just reliving it and watching a flat video — it was being able to chat with the meeting," he says. "It's like being back in the room, reliving the moment, and being able to ask it about specific topics."

A meeting stopped being a file you rewatch end to end to find one data point. It became a source you ask directly for what you need to know. For a team running against volume, that was time recovered.

The day the tool graded him

Then came something they didn't expect: Samu wasn't only capturing the team's meetings. It was measuring them, too.

Working with the Samu team, they adapted the Samu Score — built for sales — to their own terrain. They defined the key markers of project management: follow-up, discovery, what makes a customer conversation successful. And the score started telling every project lead how well they were actually doing.

Nicolás tried it on himself first. "It gave me a 4," he admits without hesitation. "And I understood I had to get better at bringing the story of why I'm in this meeting, what I'm taking away, what I'm carrying over from past meetings." The tool didn't just store the conversation: it showed him how to have a better one. The team started walking into every meeting with a method — introduce yourself, say why you're there, state the goal — and started noticing that the customer, on the other side, responded differently.

From 30% to 15%

This is where the story stops being qualitative and becomes a number.

Nicolás's team tracks what it calls the project overrun KPI: how far a project drifts from its plan in time and effort, reviewed every quarter. And discovery — the stage where listening is everything — was one of the biggest sources of overrun.

"We had an average overrun of 25 to 30%," he says. "Today we're getting it down to 15 points of overrun." The time that used to go into documenting and reconstructing what had been said dropped. But the impact didn't stop at the clock: "It doesn't just cut that time — the team can open several fronts at once. One person can take on more projects at a time."

Before, the detail of a meeting lived in the memory of whoever was in the room. Now it lives in the system, ready to be queried — and a project that used to drift by a third now drifts by half that.

Innovation and success

At the end of the conversation, they asked Nicolás for two words to describe Samu. He didn't hesitate.

"For me Samu is innovation and success. Innovation, because it brought technical improvements to a gap we had in project management. And success, because we got to see it reflected in tangible projects: not in a theory, but in a KPI and a report."
— Nicolás García, Director of Consulting and Implementations, Mandü

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