KATA Teams: The Visibility Easy Button for Engineering Teams

The engineering leaders we speak with consistently acknowledge two things:

1. Despite more tools, metrics, and frameworks than ever before, they still lack the visibility they need into what’s going on with their team.
2. They don’t want to solve the problem with project management tools. Too many broken promises. Too much work. Too much coordination. Too much time.?

They want a visibility easy button. They want one place to see everything going on with their teams but without a lot of work to set it up. They want actionable insights auto-generated from all the work happening. And they want all the workflows required to maintain visibility streamlined for them. Summing it all up, they want “visibility invisibly”.?

Frustrated with project management tools inability to solve this problem for them, engineering managers have tried tools like GitHub and Jira but they aren’t built to make it easy to see what people are working on. Jira is built around managing boards and tickets. GitHub is organized to manage code. Neither is organized around the people that do the actual work.??

While these are the tools that engineers work with daily, due to the way they’re designed, engineering managers have no good way to stay on top of what’s going on without disrupting their teams or hiring teams of people to maintain and update the information for them.?

A completely new approach was needed. So we built Teams.?

Available today, KATA Teams is designed around the people who do the work, not projects, code, tickets, or issues. KATA automatically tracks all those things too but does so in the context of what matters most to Engineering Managers, the team. Even better, unlike Jira, GitHub, or whatever project management tool you use, KATA Teams doesn’t depend on people to constantly update and manage the information to make it useful.?

Our guiding principle throughout the development process for Teams was simple: deliver accelerated visibility to engineering managers in single-player mode.?

Projects are inherently cross-functional, requiring a lot of coordination and setup. In contrast, Teams is built to deliver value out of the box. No setting up milestones, creating updates, posting events, etc. For Engineering Managers it’s designed to be your 2nd screen. An always-on portal into what’s happening across your team, giving you the visibility you crave without the overhead to get it.?

Perhaps best of all, because Teams is built exclusively for you and your team, you can avoid all the coordination friction of introducing a new project management or issue-tracking tool into the organization.?

Just connect your tools, tell KATA who's on your team, and it’ll take care of the rest. No more standups, sorting through tools, or Slack pings to see how things are going. It’s all kept up-to-date automatically in KATA so you can get back to leading your team.

Within minutes of logging in you can get answers to each of the following questions without leaving KATA:

• Who’s working on what?
• Did that critical ticket get finished?
• What’s the issue with that open PR?
• Can you give me a summary of what happened yesterday?

With Teams there will be no more time wasted by you or anyone on your team chasing down ad-hoc updates, writing daily check-ins, drafting weekly status updates, sorting through tools to see how things are going on a key deliverable, or preparing for stand-ups or 1x1’s (coming soon). KATA does it all for you, automatically tracking and generating AI-powered summaries of all the information that you and your team need to stay on top of what’s going on at whatever level you need it.?

All in, Teams is simply a better way to manage your team. But don’t take our word for it, see for yourself. Run your team using KATA Teams for a week and tell us life isn’t better.?

Sign up to get started today with Teams for free today or head over to Product Hunt to let us know what you think with feedback, comments, and support for the launch.