What did your dev team ship this week? Tessa finds out — and briefs you.
Tessa is an AI chief of staff for your engineering org. She checks in with each engineer for three minutes — a real phone call, Slack or WhatsApp, whichever they answer — on the cadence you set. What shipped, what’s blocked, what needs a decision. The brief lands the moment the last answer does. No standup meeting. No forms. No chasing.
She replies in seconds and drafts your first check-in from the conversation.
Free to start · Engineers never need accounts — or seats
The silence between demos is expensive.
If you run — or pay for — a dev team, you already know these weeks.
Blockers surface at the sprint review
Someone was stuck since Tuesday. You find out Friday, at the demo, with the deadline already gone. A three-day blocker quietly became a two-week slip.
“Almost done” for three weeks
The board says In Progress. Jira went stale a sprint ago. The only accurate status lives in someone’s head — and nobody is writing it down.
Standups that cost more than they tell
Thirty minutes of prime focus time, whole team, every day — for updates that fit in ninety seconds of reading. Remote and timezones make it worse.
You’re asked for status you don’t have
The CEO wants a date. A customer was promised a feature. You end up forwarding Slack threads at 11 pm, hoping somebody answers before morning.
Three steps. Then it runs itself.
You set it up once — in about two minutes. Tessa handles every check-in after that.
Start from the Dev Team Check-in template
Four questions engineers respect: What shipped? What’s risky? Where are you blocked? What needs review? Edit anything, set the cadence and timezone — you’re done in about two minutes.
- A ready-made dev standup — every question yours to edit
- Daily or weekly, your timezone
- Build it without creating an account
Tessa checks in with every engineer, their way
A three-minute call for people who’d rather talk it out. Slack or WhatsApp for people mid-flow. She asks real follow-up questions, listens, and never books a meeting.
- Phone, Slack, WhatsApp, SMS or email — set per person
- She follows up with whoever she missed
- English, Spanish or French
You read the brief — blockers on top
The moment a run completes, an executive brief lands in your inbox: what shipped, who’s blocked and on what, what needs your decision — per-engineer attribution, full transcripts one click away.
- Blockers flagged in the subject line
- Trends across weeks, not vibes
- Reply to the brief to steer the next run
The people asking you for status can just… read it.
Add Insights viewers — free seats for the people who need the picture but never run the team. They get every run report, plus a weekly digest.
Sees shipped features and slipped dates the day they happen — not at the quarterly review. No dashboard training, no login ritual. It’s an email.
Answers “when will it ship?” from this week’s truth instead of last quarter’s roadmap. Fewer promises engineering never made.
Stop being the router between your team and everyone above it. The brief reaches the right people the moment it exists — you forwarded nothing.
Insights viewers are free on the Team plan — they read; they never burn your minutes.
Engineers hate standups. This isn’t one.
Tessa gives your team back the meeting — and gives you back the signal.
Three minutes, out loud
Talking beats writing a status doc. Tessa asks, they answer, back to work. No app, no account, no form.
On the team’s rhythm
Runs on the schedule your team picks. Whoever she can’t reach gets an async follow-up on Slack, WhatsApp or email — nobody stands up at 6 am.
Open by design
Tessa asks the questions everyone agreed on, and answers land in the shared team feed. No activity tracking, no screenshots, no scores. It replaces a meeting, not trust.
She actually listens
Follow-up questions, not checkbox forms. Engineers tell a good listener things that never make it into a ticket.
You’ve tried fixing standup before.
The daily standup meeting
- 30 focus-minutes × every engineer × every day
- Timezones make it somebody’s 6 am
- The loudest update wins; blockers still hide
- Seniors multitask through it
The standup bot
- Novel for a week, ignored by week three
- One-line answers, zero follow-up questions
- A thread nobody actually reads
- Still typing. Still a form.
Tessa
- A 3-minute conversation with real follow-ups
- Voice, Slack or WhatsApp — per person
- An executive brief with blockers on top
- C-level and customer success looped in automatically
Engineers are free. You pay for Tessa’s time.
- Start free: 200 Tessa-minutes a month — web check-ins from day one; phone calls unlock when you verify your phone and add a card ($0, never charged automatically)
- Team: $99/month per builder — each seat pools 100 included minutes, then 15¢ a minute in packs that never expire
- Billed per second — calls nobody answers cost nothing
- Members, Insights viewers and stakeholders: free, always
A daily check-in for 5 engineers at ~3 minutes each is about 315 minutes a month: one builder seat + minutes ≈ $131/month.
The daily 30-minute standup it replaces costs those same five engineers roughly 50 engineer-hours a month. You do the salary math.
Ask your check-ins anything from Claude or ChatGPT. The Team plan includes a read-only MCP connector for builders — “what blocked the payments project this month?” becomes a prompt, not an archaeology dig.
Building something of your own? The primitives behind Tessa — routines, behaviors, per-person memory, routing, run reports — are becoming an API. Build your own check-in experience on the chief-of-staff platform, not on raw voice minutes. Talk to us →
Asked by every engineering leader so far
Will my engineers actually answer an AI call?
Some love talking; some never pick up an unknown number — so Tessa doesn’t depend on it. Each person gets an ordered ladder: call first, then Slack, WhatsApp, SMS or email. They answer wherever they already live, and the run report shows exactly who responded and who didn’t. Silence is a signal too.
Is this employee surveillance?
No — and it’s built so it can’t quietly become it. Tessa asks the questions you configured — the same ones a standup asks — and every answer is visible to the team in the shared feed. There’s no screen recording, no activity tracking, no productivity scoring. It replaces a status meeting, not trust.
Do engineers need to install or sign up for anything?
No. Tessa reaches them on a normal phone call, Slack, WhatsApp, SMS or email. No app, no account, no seat cost — members are free, always.
What does it cost?
Start free: 200 Tessa-minutes a month — web check-ins from day one; phone calls unlock when you verify your phone and add a card ($0, a safety check — never charged automatically). The Team plan is $99/month per builder (the person who runs the routines); each seat pools 100 included minutes, then it’s 15¢ a minute in packs that never expire. Billing is per second, and calls nobody answers cost nothing. Engineers, viewers and stakeholders are free.
We’re distributed across timezones.
That’s the point. There’s no meeting to schedule — the routine runs on the cadence and timezone you set, and anyone Tessa can’t reach live gets the async follow-up. Engineers answer in their morning; the brief reads the same in yours.
Can I try it before involving my team?
Yes. Build the routine, then rehearse it on yourself: take Tessa’s call in the browser, answer her questions, and read the report she writes about you. Invite the team when you’ve seen it.
Where does our data live?
Check-ins, transcripts and reports belong to your workspace, and only the people you add can see them. Read our security overview for the details. Security overview →
By Friday, you could just… know.
Say hello to Tessa — she drafts your dev check-in from that conversation and takes it from there. Free to start — and your engineers never pay.
She replies in seconds and drafts your first check-in from the conversation.