The signals were always there.
Nobody had time to look.

Why it exists

I kept finding out too late.

The brief composer is product-enforced, not just policy: it rejects any output that names a message body, assigns a score, or frames a signal as grounds for an adverse action. These aren’t promises about what we won’t build. They’re constraints on what the product lets ship.

“The right product for a manager isn’t surveillance over their team. It’s the conversation they didn’t know to schedule.”

What it is

Your old instruments stopped working.

The signals managers used to read in person — energy at standup, who lingers after a meeting, the hallway sigh — moved into Slack, Github, and the calendar over the last few years. Most engineering teams now do half their real communication async. The patterns are still there. The instruments to read them aren’t.

Sonar is built for that moment. One product, opinionated, metadata-only, priced for one manager — not for an HR-org rollout. The category was stuck between cheap-but-creepy (Time Doctor) and expensive-but-thoughtful (Lattice). There’s a middle now.

How we build

Four principles that aren’t negotiable.

There are a lot of ways to build a product in this space. We made specific choices about what Sonar is and is not. These are the ones that shaped everything else.

1. 01

   Conversation-first, not report-first.

   The brief's job is to name the right person and give you one reason to check in. Not to generate a report you have to decode. Every design decision runs through this filter: does this help the manager have a conversation, or does it give them more to stare at?

2. 02

   Metadata only — by architecture, not just policy.

   Most privacy promises are written in a terms document. Ours are enforced at the ingestion layer. Sonar's pipeline physically cannot receive message content. We chose this constraint before the first line of product code was written because we knew a tool like this would only earn trust if the architecture itself made the boundaries real.

3. 03

   No scores. No rankings.

   Scoring people is a different product. It's a product that gets used in performance reviews, shared with HR, and eventually used against people. We made a deliberate decision not to build it. Sonar points at patterns; it never grades individuals. That's not a limitation — it's the point.

4. 04

   Managers are the customer. Employees are protected.

   Managers pay for Sonar and read the brief. But the engineers on their teams are the people the tool is about. We hold both relationships seriously. That means employee data controls (view, delete, no-ticket-needed), a clear policy against HR use, and a product design that makes surveillance harder, not easier.

Our commitments

The four things that don’t change.

1. 01

   Metadata only. Timestamps and events — never message content, never commit content, never call transcripts.

2. 02

   No scores. We don't rate people or rank them against each other. There's no number, no leaderboard, no red flag sent to HR.

3. 03

   Never touches HR. The brief is for you, the manager. It will never suggest or support a firing, a PIP, or any adverse action.

4. 04

   Your team sees their own data. Every person can see what was collected about them, which signals fired, and delete their data. No ticket needed.

Full technical details at /security and /trust.

Founder

Yash Agarwal

Founder & engineer

I’ve sat on both sides of the management relationship — as an engineer who wanted their manager to notice without being asked, and as a manager who kept noticing too late. The version of Sonar that earned the trust of engineers on those teams was the one where I showed them exactly what it could and couldn’t see. That transparency is still the product.

I’m building this for the manager who cares and keeps dropping the ball anyway — not because they don’t pay attention, but because they don’t have a system that pays attention with them.

Email me directly at yash@sonarwork.com. I read every one.

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