Workbench gets a name and the Portal learns campaigns

May to July 2025: the link tool became the first section of something called Workbench, a content app with drafts and feedback went to the writing team, and the Portal was refit around campaigns, partners and the people at each.

May, June and July 2025 is the period where the internal tooling stopped being one tool and became a plan, the word Workbench first appeared, and the Portal was rebuilt around the objects our business actually runs on: partners, the people at each partner, and their campaigns.

For our partners

The Portal gained campaigns. On June 30 the data underneath it was refit so that a partner has contacts, contacts have roles, and every client engagement is a campaign with its own page. The campaign page had tabs for conversations and billing from that day, even though both were empty. By July 29 our team could edit a campaign’s details, and from July 30 keep notes on it that a partner could read.

On July 25 the team side got full editing for employees, partners, partner team members and onboarding. Most of that was for us, but it meant a partner’s list of people in the Portal was finally maintained in the Portal rather than in a spreadsheet.

None of this was a live view of work yet. Campaign details were typed in by our team. What a partner got was a tidier and more truthful account of what they had with us.

Behind the scenes

1. On June 15 the link tool’s sidebar was rebuilt with new sections for content, partner management, sales discovery, SEO work and strategy, and the work was labelled as preparing for Workbench. That is the first time the name appears in the record.
2. The same day brought the first agent we ever wrote, a link planner meant to draft quarterly and monthly plans and take feedback from the team.
3. Content got its own app in July. From July 15 the content repository became a working tool, a content asset with a brief, a draft, a feedback loop with the writer, and automatic polling of optimisation scores so a writer did not have to check by hand, and the team’s feedback shaped it from the first day of use.
4. The link tool itself got a complete interface overhaul on June 10, link reporting on June 11, a way to handle sites with issues in bulk on June 23, and publishing filters on June 25.

1. Preparing for Workbench

All of the new sections were placeholders except links. The idea was already clear: one internal tool where every kind of work lives, with links as the first finished room.

2. The first agent

It was a prototype in a folder and it did not become the agent we run today, but the shape of it, a plan an agent drafts and a person corrects, is exactly the shape we ended up with.

4. The link tool feeds the old systems

The bulk handling came with a small plugin for updating posts on many sites at once. The data still lived elsewhere: the tool wrote link results back into spreadsheet tabs, and by May 1 it was syncing to the cards on our task board. The new tool fed the old systems of record. That was the right call at the time, and it is also why the spreadsheets did not disappear for another year.