This webinar is hosted by Programa in partnership with Alessandra Smith Design. By registering, you agree to receive follow-up communications about Programa's design project management platform.
Alessandra's journey began in an unlikely place. After ten years as a pharmacist, she pursued her passion for interior design, launching Alessandra Smith Design in 2022 during an economic downturn. What started as passion-driven chaos—intimidating spreadsheets, scattered client communications, and manual admin consuming precious creative time—evolved into a sophisticated 6-stage framework that now powers every project.
Today, Alessandra manages 8 active projects simultaneously while maintaining the quality and creativity that built her reputation. Her secret? A systematic approach to project management that puts Programa at the centre of everything.
The results:
4x project capacity without hiring additional staff
50% reduction in client email back-and-forth
Complete visibility across all projects at any time
More time for creativity and less time chasing spreadsheets
Alessandra prefers to present, concept boards, client dashboards and design development presentations in person, but if not online is available too.
"If I can always in person. If I'm working on a remote project and that's not possible, then we'll do it online, but I do prefer to do all my meetings in person."
"I use Google Forms for questionnaires and then I can upload the questionnaire, to the project. So when you click into project settings, there's, two toggles. One is client dashboard. You click into client dashboard dashboard, and you can upload anything that you can't embed directly into Programa. So because my questionnaire isn't on, Canva, it's a Google form, I can attach it to the client dashboard through the settings related to the project."
"I will put together an arbitrary figure for all freight related costs at the concept stage, and then that figure gets refined at design development. So at design development, before I go into that meeting, I will send off bulk quotes."
"So I can, in real time, while I'm sitting there with the client, change the quantity. So I'm presenting three sofas. So rather than saying one vs one, I can put in one next to the sofa that's my favorite and have zero quantity for the other two. And then in real time, if they tell me, actually, we like the other sofa, I can change things around really quickly and be able to update them on where their budget is sitting."
"So I like to lock in all of my meetings with a client at the briefing meeting. So when I attend the briefing meeting, I will schedule in when we plan on having our concept presentation and when we have our design development presentation scheduled, and I will send them invites using my Google Calendar."
"And then I'll put those dates also into project management. So I have them as key milestones. So I can see when I'm looking at timeline view, making sure I'm not doing too many big presentations all in the one week."
"I don't like to deal with paper, so no no hard copies. I will upload the warranty as an attachment in the schedule."
"Because I give my clients full access to the schedule, they can click on that particular contract or piece. If they scroll down, they will see the warranty attachment there."