Nick QuirkWhy Percentage Complete Lies to You
Ask any project manager what's worse than a task sitting at 80% complete for three weeks, and they'll tell you: having no idea why it's stuck there. Traditional progress tracking — percentages, completion columns, green/amber/red status dots — tells you what has happened. It doesn't tell you whether the team knows what to do next.
That gap is exactly what hill charts were designed to close. For marketing and SEO agencies running parallel client projects, they're one of the most underused thinking tools available.
What a Hill Chart Actually Is
A hill chart plots work items on a curve shaped like a hill. The left slope represents the uphill phase: the team is still figuring things out — defining scope, resolving unknowns, making decisions about approach. The right slope is the downhill phase: the approach is clear and execution is rolling.
The concept was introduced by Ryan Singer and the team at Basecamp as part of their Shape Up methodology. The insight is simple but powerful: progress is not linear. A task can be technically "started" while the team is still completely uncertain about how to finish it. A hill chart makes that uncertainty visible.
Positions on the hill don't represent time spent or percentage of tasks ticked off. They represent confidence and momentum. Moving up the left side means reducing uncertainty. Cresting the top means the path is clear. Moving down the right side means shipping.
Why Marketing Projects Need This More Than Most
Software teams built hill charts, but the problems they solve are even more acute in marketing and SEO work. Here's why:
Marketing work is full of hidden unknowns
A technical SEO audit sounds like a defined task. In practice, it might involve waiting on crawl access, discovering a legacy subdomain nobody knew existed, or realising the CMS has a pagination issue that changes the entire recommendation set. None of that shows up as "blocked" on a Kanban card until someone manually flags it.
This is one reason Kanban boards struggle with complex SEO campaigns — they're excellent at visualising workflow states but blind to the problem-solving happening inside each card.
Client deliverables have fuzzy front ends
An content strategy, a keyword cluster, a link-building pitch list — these all have a discovery phase where the work is genuinely ambiguous. Hill charts give that phase a name and a place on the board, instead of letting it collapse silently into "In Progress."
Account managers need to communicate honestly without alarming clients
When a client asks "where are we on the content audit?", the honest answer is often "we've started but we're still figuring out the structure." Hill charts give PMs language and a visual to have that conversation clearly — and credibly.
How to Apply Hill Charts to Agency Work
Choose the right level of granularity
Hill charts work best when each item on the chart is a meaningful unit of work — not a subtask, not an epic. For a typical SEO retainer, that might mean tracking items like:
- Technical audit for Client A
- Content cluster: commercial keywords (Client B)
- Q3 link-building campaign (Client C)
- Monthly reporting pack (Client A)
Putting individual tasks on a hill chart creates noise. Putting entire projects creates too little visibility. The sweet spot is initiatives or deliverables — chunks of work that take one to three weeks and have a clear outcome.
Move items based on confidence, not effort
This is the hardest habit to build. Teams are used to reporting time spent or tasks completed. Hill charts ask a different question: Do we know how to finish this?
A practical way to run this in a weekly sync: for each item on the hill, the responsible person answers two questions — "What's the last decision we made?" and "What's the next decision we need to make?" If there's no clear answer to the second question, the item probably isn't as far downhill as it looks.
Watch for items that stop moving
The most valuable signal a hill chart gives you is stasis. If an item hasn't moved in two weeks, that's a conversation — not a crisis, but something to examine. In agency work, common culprits are:
- Waiting on client access or approvals (dependency, not genuine progress)
- Scope that was never properly defined at kickoff
- A team member uncertain about the approach but not surfacing it
- Competing priorities quietly pulling bandwidth away
None of these show up as a red RAG status until the deadline is close. Hill charts surface them earlier.
A Concrete Example: Running a Hill Chart for an SEO Campaign
Say you're managing a six-month SEO engagement for a B2B SaaS client. The current sprint covers three initiatives: a site architecture review, a pillar content piece, and a backlink gap analysis.
Week 1: All three items sit at the far left — you've scoped them but not started. Week 2: The backlink gap analysis moves to the middle of the uphill slope — the team has pulled data and is deciding which competitor gaps to prioritise. The architecture review is still at the bottom left; you're waiting on a Screaming Frog crawl to complete. Week 3: The backlink analysis crests the top — approach is locked, now it's execution. The pillar content piece is climbing — the brief is approved, structure is agreed. Week 4: Architecture review still hasn't moved. That's your cue to ask why.
In a weekly standup without hill charts, the architecture review might just get logged as "in progress." On a hill chart, two weeks of no movement is visible at a glance.
Hill Charts and Client Reporting
One underappreciated use case is client-facing reporting. Rather than sending a spreadsheet of task completions, you can share a simplified hill chart that shows three to five key deliverables and where they sit. Clients can see at a glance what's still being figured out versus what's in execution.
This changes the nature of client conversations. Instead of defending why something isn't "done," you're showing a live picture of confidence and momentum. It shifts the relationship from gotcha reporting to genuine collaboration.
If you're still building the infrastructure around how you onboard and report to clients, it's worth reading about how to standardize SEO client onboarding — getting alignment on deliverable structure upfront makes hill charts far easier to run.
Tooling: Do You Need Dedicated Software?
Basecamp has native hill chart support built into its to-do lists. If you're evaluating whether that's the right fit for your agency, a detailed comparison of Basecamp against alternatives is worth reviewing before you commit.
That said, you don't need dedicated software to run hill charts. A shared Figma file with a simple hill shape and moveable dots works. A Google Slide updated weekly works. What matters is the ritual of updating and the conversation it triggers — not the platform.
PeakKR supports initiative-level progress tracking with hill-style visibility, which fits naturally into agency workflows where you're managing multiple client projects simultaneously alongside retainer work.
If you're running more than five client accounts at once, the bigger challenge is often system-level — how you structure your project hierarchy, how you separate client work from internal tasks, how you make sure nothing slips. Hill charts are one piece of that; managing multiple agency projects without dropping the ball covers the broader picture.
Common Mistakes When Starting With Hill Charts
- Tracking too many items: More than eight to ten items on a single hill chart makes it unreadable. Group smaller tasks into initiatives first.
- Moving items based on time, not confidence: "We've been working on it for a week so it must be uphill" is not hill chart logic. Ask about uncertainty, not elapsed time.
- Treating the hill as a Gantt substitute: Hill charts don't show deadlines or dependencies. They're a confidence map, not a schedule. Use both.
- Skipping the weekly update ritual: A hill chart that gets updated once a month is just a picture. The value is in the regular conversation it forces.
- Only showing hill charts internally: Client-facing hill charts build trust. Most clients have never seen one and respond well to the honesty they represent.
Practical Starting Checklist
- List your current active deliverables per client — aim for three to six per account
- Draw a simple hill (paper or digital) and place each deliverable where it honestly sits today
- For any item on the left slope, write down the single biggest unanswered question blocking progress
- Add a ten-minute hill chart review to your weekly team standup
- Flag any item that hasn't moved in two consecutive weeks for a dedicated conversation
- Try sharing a simplified version with one client in your next status update and note their reaction
- Review your tooling — can your current PM setup track initiative-level progress, or are you only seeing task-level data?
