Don't Care About the Plumbing

We speak with hundreds of companies while building thatworks.ai and often hear this: "We get notifications and information from all our tools into Slack, but it's impossible to know what is actually happening at work."

Here's another way to put it: we've got all the pipes in our house dumping water into a single room but we're drowning and don't know why.

This happens because we care too much about the process of consolidating information, without considering the impact of doing so haphazardly.

To avoid drowning, people spend hours each week doing manual work in a vicious cycle: finding information across multiple tools, summarizing as best they can, taking screenshots of dashboards, trying to write coherent reports, and then hoping their efforts don't get drowned out by the noise.

Process and visibility are useful, but that usefulness is quickly lost when ultimately your only effective tool is manual grunt work that people hate.

Instead, we need tooling that shifts the focus away from merely dumping information to automating the grunt work of synthesizing information and drawing insights. We shouldn't have to care about the plumbing.

Abesh (my co-founder) and I currently work in different time zones (US West Coast and UK), which creates challenges for collaboration. One of the first problems we solved with our product was easily catching up on each other's work. We want to maximize time spent discussing tactics and strategy, not running through a checklist to ensure we're on the same page. It's magical when a tool does this automatically, rather than both of us manually spending hours every week to stay in sync.