Feature launch: An AI Coach for happier, higher-performing teams

Now more than ever, every team is pressured to do more with less. From shipping code, giving peer feedback, addressing customer queries, and managing project scope, there’s a lot to do. Add to that the pressure on managers to do IC work and an increase in the number of direct reports per manager. With so much going on, catching the warning signs of delivery delays or burnout can be hard.

Recognizing these challenges, we are stoked to announce the Multitudes AI Coach. Designed to be your friendly assistant, our AI-powered coach helps everyone on the team stay ahead of issues and guides you to lead your team with confidence and empathy.

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What does the AI coach do?

• Identify hotspots: Our AI Coach keeps an eye out for outliers, changes in trends, and areas where your team isn’t meeting your goals. When it catches these, it will proactively flag the hotspots to you in Slack. For instance, if your <code-text>Change Failure Rate<code-text> surged by 40% over the last week, our AI Coach will let you know.‍

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• Diagnose potential causes: Our AI Coach then explores behavioral data to look for potential drivers of the issues it’s found. For instance, we might identify that an increase in <code-text>Out-Of-Hours Work<code-text> is correlated with the increase in <code-text>Change Failure Rate<code-text>.

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• Suggest actions: Our AI Coach then provides actionable suggestions based on the hotspots and drivers it identified. We might suggest a question to ask your team to get more context on the data, or an experiment you can try to improve outcomes. For example, with the case above where <code-text>Out-Of-Hours Work<code-text> is contributing to the <code-text>Change Failure Rate<code-text> trend, we might suggest that you ask this in your next retro: “As a team, are we getting enough breaks and rest to do high-quality work?”

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Get all of this delivered via Slack so that you can get support without changing your workflow. Simply type <code-text>/multitudes<code-text> to chat with our AI coach.

If you’re an existing customer, you’ll need to re-install Slack from the Alerts page, see GIF below!

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Where does Multitudes get the data from?

The Multitudes platform integrates with the tools you use, from GitHub and Jira to Linear and Opsgenie. From that behavioral data, we look at trends around team performance, wellbeing, and collaboration – and we surface insights like what work is blocked, who’s at risk of burnout, and who’s not getting enough feedback and support. 

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Prioritizing Data Ethics at Multitudes

At Multitudes, our bigger goal is to support teams in a human-centric way. We know that data is a tool that must be used carefully, so we created a set of data ethics principles right at the start of building this product

As one example, we don’t show individual performance metrics, just individual metrics that encourage support (e.g., to celebrate someone giving lots of feedback or checking in on someone doing lots of out-of-hours work). 

Our data ethics principles guide us to innovate with AI responsibly, and we welcome feedback on our actions. Check out this blog on how we think about algorithmic bias.

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