Project management has historically had a top-down mindset that provides metrics to executives as to how their individual developers are performing. And those metrics, claimed Dan Lines, COO at project management solution startup LinearB, aren’t giving value to developers.

“Software project management is broken,” Lines told SD Times in a recent interview. “Developers don’t want to have ‘Big Brother’ looking over their shoulder.”

LinearB has created a new tool to help development teams overcome challenges with extant project management tools that are “good for planning but don’t add value once dev teams start building,” the company said in a statement about today’s product rollout.

In its announcement, LinearB said its solution provides developers with actionable information where they work — in Git and Slack. The solution, Lines told SD Times, “can see where a pull request stalled and send a Slack message to get someone to review it,” among other developer-focused features. He went on to explain that the features in LinearB are tied into ceremonies such as a daily standup and retrospectives. With LinearB, development teams don’t have to give status updates at the standups; that information is automatically provided in the tool’s dashboard. Instead, those teams can talk about the problems they’re having advancing the project toward its goals. “Commits, branches, and pull requests all have visibility” with LinearB, he said.

This improved visibility helps organizations gain clarity into what to work on, when to add staff and where to invest in automation, the company said in its announcement.

And, with the coronavirus pandemic accelerating the work-from-home culture that is growing, LinearB supports asynchronous development by giving everyone real-time visibility into projects, so they don’t need to wait for status meetings or manual updates to advance their work.

LinearB also hosts a Discord community to give project leaders a home to exchange issues they face or gain tips from their peers, Lines said. Right now, there are about 350 development leaders in the community.