How Clutch scaled its PS operation as the company grew 3x in two years

Clutch is a fast-growing fintech startup that builds digital account-opening and loan-application software for credit unions. Its platform connects prospective members to fraud checks, funding workflows, and backend core banking or loan origination systems. It is a technically complex product to implement, with dozens of steps, multiple third-party integrations, and little room for missed handoffs.

Daniel Levine joined as Director of Professional Services just over two years ago, bringing prior experience at Gainsight, Blend and Salesforce. That background meant he arrived with a clear view of what a mature professional services operation looked like, and within months of starting, he was making the case to the founders that the team would need a purpose-built PSA. Within ten months, he had one.

In the last two years, Clutch has more than tripled in growth and size, and the PS function has scaled with it, growing from a handful of implementation-minded CSMs to a dedicated organisation of engagement managers and engineers managing over 100 concurrent projects.

The world before Rocketlane

Clutch ran its early implementations on a lightweight task management tool, one never built for this complexity or scale. It could handle basic tracking, but the gaps were clear from the start.

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Scattered enablement left the team depending on individual memory

No two Clutch implementations are exactly alike. Project steps vary by credit union tech stack, loan types, and backend systems, and without a way to build that variation into the plan itself, the team relied on institutional knowledge and individual memory. All project plans referenced internal Notion pages, meaning engineers and engagement managers had to navigate between systems just to know what to do next. For a fast-growing team onboarding new people regularly, that wasn’t sustainable.

No governance without manual chasing

Daniel had a clear framework for what good operations looked like, and it wasn’t built on reminders. The existing tool offered neither. Project records were only as reliable as the last update, and keeping them current meant trusting everyone’s diligence, or constantly stepping in to correct things.

“I’m very against telling people two things as a leader, Number one: ‘remember you need to do this thing.’ There’s no remembering. That’s a recipe for failure. Your systems should mandate that people go through certain steps. Number two: telling people they need to manually keep things updated so I know the status of their project. I want systems to handle that.” 

Lack of real-time visibility across the projects

There was no portfolio-level view, no dashboards, and no exec-ready reporting. Checking any project’s status meant navigating into that customer record and opening the plan individually. As the pipeline grew, that was no longer viable. 

A CS tool pilot confirmed the gap

Before committing to a purpose-built PSA, Clutch piloted a customer success tool the team was already evaluating for post-live client management, to test whether a single system could serve both functions. It couldn’t. The CS tool offered roughly the same level of basic task tracking as what Clutch already had, without the portfolio visibility, governance controls, or exec-level reporting Daniel had identified as non-negotiable. The pilot confirmed what he had already suspected: a generic CS tool is not the right fit for his team. 

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The Transformation With Rocketlane

When Clutch committed to a purpose-built PSA, they were six weeks from their busiest season. Deals close in December, and whatever tool they chose had to be live before the new year. Clutch evaluated Rocketlane alongside Precursive, but the decision tipped in Rocketlane’s favour because of its UI clarity, feature depth, and product velocity. It was a platform Clutch believed was built to scale with them.

One thing that made the go-live unusually fast: Daniel had gotten hands-on with Rocketlane during the sales process, using a demo environment to build out the first version of their project template. That environment effectively became their production instance when they signed. From contract signature to the full team being live took seven days, right before the January rush.

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Building a scalable team structure

One of Daniel’s earliest observations at Clutch was that the existing model wasn’t built to scale. Customer success managers were running implementations and spending roughly 90% of their time on onboarding, leaving little capacity for the post-live strategic work that CS is designed to do.

Daniel made the case for a dedicated engagement manager function within months of joining. The first hire joined in five months, and the team has grown steadily since. Today, Clutch’s PS organisation includes about a dozen engagement managers and sixteen engineers, running a portfolio of over 100 concurrent projects. The shift also freed the CS team to focus entirely on live clients: EBRs, renewals, and long-term relationship management. Rocketlane runs the operations, but the structural redesign was a prerequisite for making those operations scale.

Project Delivery Enablement built into every step

Rocketlane’s private notes allowed the team to implement guidance directly into each task in the project template. Rather than linking out to Notion or expecting ICs to know what to do, every step now tells the person running it exactly what is required, with examples from comparable past projects. New engagement managers consistently describe the experience as immediately intuitive.

"There was never any issue around adoption. Every person who comes in is wowed by the system. It makes their jobs easier — which is candidly exactly what I was looking to accomplish."

Portfolio visibility from day one

The transition from 40 to 70 concurrent projects over December 2024 and January 2025, driven by a strong sales quarter, landed precisely when Rocketlane went live. For the first time, the team could see the health of the entire portfolio in a single view: where projects were, where they were stalling, and when they were projected to go live.

Clutch now tracks five key milestones across every implementation, and measures how long projects spend between each one. When a project approaches or exceeds the expected time between milestones, the team can proactively intervene rather than wait for an end-of-project retrospective.

“I just want the individual contributors to do their job and everything else should happen magically on the backend. Based on where the project plan is, we should know what stage it’s at.”

Salesforce integration as the connective layer

Clutch is a heavy Salesforce shop. When a sales opportunity closes, a project record is created in Salesforce. An implementation manager fills in five or six fields (template, start date, associated revenue) and the project is created in Rocketlane automatically. From that point, critical data flows back: go-live dates update in Salesforce when the corresponding task moves in Rocketlane, CSAT surveys fire at defined milestones, and time-to-value calculations run on the backend without any manual input.

Dynamic project plans that adapt to each customer

Because Clutch integrates with a range of third-party systems, implementation plans vary by customer tech stack. Rocketlane’s dynamic task logic automatically adds relevant tasks based on the integration, so the right steps are always in the plan and can’t be skipped by accident. This has driven measurable improvements in delivery consistency and, is steadily rising customer satisfaction scores over the past 16 months.

What's Next

Clutch operates in a complex, integration-heavy environment where the margin for manual work is shrinking. The next phase for the services team is building AI-focused workflows that match the pace and scale the business demands, and Rocketlane’s Nitro AI features are central to that roadmap. The team uses it to draft customer emails and auto-generate weekly call summaries. A feature that consolidates multiple calls into a single update has eliminated a manual step from every weekly check-in.

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Clutch is also in a pilot for AI-powered timesheet policy enforcement. Rather than asking managers to review every time entry manually, the team is configuring prompts that flag specific conditions automatically: hours logged beyond a forecast threshold, or a team member logging enough hours in a single week to warrant a workload conversation. As the PS function grows, these automated guardrails will be essential to maintaining delivery quality at scale.