KATA Takes Form, Brick-by-Brick

We've been busy stacking bricks. When you're heads down building, it can be easy to forget to pause occasionally and take stock of your progress.

Today is a good day to do just that. We just pushed out a huge KATA release. It's the culmination of a lot of learning from our customers and work from the team. Over the past 6 months, we've been engaged with the first wave of customers through our Early Access Program. They've taught us a lot about the challenges engineering teams face with their existing approach to project management, how they work, and how they want KATA to work for them.

With traditional project management tools, the value you get out of them depends entirely on what information you manually feed into them. But tracking down all the activity and progress indicators requires a lot of heavy lifting and constant nagging that no one enjoys. With this release, KATA flips the script. We're completely modernizing project management by empowering project managers and the engineering teams they support, not the other way around.

The highlights of this release are defined by our interactions with customers throughout the Early Access Program; accelerated onboarding, tighter Jira integration, automated status updates, streamlined IC check-ins, and flexible project organization and grouping.

With these additions, KATA is fully equipped to offload all the project management grunt work so engineering teams can focus on the important stuff, like making decisions, removing blockers, mitigating risks, and shipping killer products. Say goodbye to the never-ending cycle of disruptions, check-in meetings, pings, and the writing and rewriting status updates. KATA is the single source of truth for efficiently tracking, translating, and communicating what's going on at any level of an engineering organization (Watch product trailer).

One of my favorite startup quotes is, "If you're not embarrassed by how naive you were six months ago, then you're not learning fast enough."* Looking back on the last 6 months here, KATA is practically unrecognizable from where it was. The same can be said for our messaging. Our website is on its 4th iteration since I joined, with each rev progressively tighter. So while I'm sufficiently humbled when looking back on where we've come from, it's more than offset by how proud I am of where we are today.

With each assumption we've invalidated, every mistake we've corrected, every deck we've tweaked, every ticket we've opened, every hole we've closed, and every feature we've shipped, we've gotten better. Add it all up, and we're 100x better than we were but still 100x short of where we need to go. At this stage of the company and product, that feels like exactly the right place to be.

Guess it's time to get back to stacking bricks.

Interested in seeing what KATA can do for you and your team? Sign up here.

*Footnote - While I’ve seen versions of this quote attributed to different people over the years, I can't track down the original source. It often gets confused with Reid Hoffman’s quote, “If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”