These ideas are the pillars and beliefs that guide our vision and product development decisions.
Goals are an important part of managing a project, or a person but we are not focused on goals, we are focused on growth. Goals are designed to achieve a specific measure of success bounded by time. Bounce a ball 50 times in a row is a goal. Growth is improving or acquiring a skill or habit that will make a person perpetually more effective. Becoming a better basketball player is growth.
Analytics, metrics, dashboards are great for reviewing output, productivity, and past performance, but they are not the best tool for making real-time interventions or guiding what needs to happen right now to improve. We focus on actions. We drive action by using smart contextual guidance and gently nudging towards positive behaviors. A dashboard may show you that something needs improvement. Actions tell you what you need to do to make the current work stream align with your personal growth plan.
Tyrannical micro-management is the absolute last thing a team needs in order to effectively grow and scale. Oversight is a necessary leadership and management quality, but are tools that are designed specifically to provide better oversight and insights into team performance if that is the sole need for an organization. We provide ownership, but ownership with accountability. We distribute the ownership of work and growth to the people closest to it, and we track (and help celebrate) the work the is usually untracked and invisible on a team (mentorship, pairing, learning, teaching).
In addition we provide contextual feedback based on real events happening in the system. Kudos, Karma, Praise, Thanks are not arbitrary, they are based on actual actions and activity in our system. 360-degree reviews are a side effect of using our system allowing everyone to own the quality and direction of growth across their team.
Execs at high levels need to communicate with a huge graph efficiently, so they have assistants to push important interactions directly to them.
Developers don't have that. We have tools that collapse real-time interactions and needs down to a static snapshot view of information. In dashboards, scrum boards, issue trackers, etc., blockers and bottlenecks may not get addressed in real-time, rather only when developers remember to check on them. In other words, we have pull-model communication and collaboration mechanisms. So we miss out on moments when actions can be most impactful.
Botany gives us what important/highly critical people have: a personal assistant to push opportunities, interactions, and needs to us when they matter most. We provide actionable nudges in-the-moment. When action is most impactful/efficient.
The core concepts and models that enable our growth framework
reviewing code, writing code, learning continuously, communicating status and blockers