Why we built Sonar

Most software a manager touches is built for the company that employs the manager, not for the manager themselves. Performance-management tools are built to standardize ratings for HR. Engagement surveys are built to give leadership a number to report up. Time-tracking tools exist because someone in finance asked for them. The manager is a data-collection endpoint.

Sonar is built the other way around. The user is the manager. The job is to give that one human a short brief every weekday morning — written for them, scoped to their team, in their voice — about what changed, what needs attention, and what's worth noting but not urgent. Five minutes of reading replaces an hour of "let me go check Slack and Jira and the calendar and that one Notion doc."

The thing we kept running into when we started building is that "what changed on my team" is impossible to answer well without two pieces of context most management tools don't have. First, per-person baselines: Alex normally commits twice a day, so a quiet day is unusual; Jordan normally commits twice a week, so a quiet day means nothing. Second, the social cost of being wrong: flagging "Alex seems checked out" when Alex was just on PTO is the kind of mistake that destroys the manager's trust in the tool forever. So we built per-person baselines and a strict layer of safety rules that any signal has to pass before it becomes brief content.

We also built the trust layer first, before any of the signal logic. Anyone on a team can pause themselves, opt out entirely, export everything we have on them, or trigger a full delete. The killswitch substrate (7 different "off" modes) exists because we ourselves don't trust software that can't be turned off. The bias monitor exists because we don't trust ourselves to have built a system that's automatically fair across demographics — we'd rather measure and publish that than hope.

If any of this resonates and you want to try it on your own team, reach out at /contact. If you'd rather see how the first wave works, /blog/first-twelve-users is that post.