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Hetchr was a centralized, bi-directional dashboard designed for developers, aiming to reduce the number of tools a developer uses alongside coding ones. By integrating popular tool APIs, we offered a dashboard that simplified actions and provided a comprehensive overview with ease, significantly reducing daily back-and-forth. It also allowed managers to gain a 360-degree view of team work in seconds. Unfortunately, we had to pivot because developers did not trust our tool enough to let it perform their actions, leading to an increase in time spent on tools instead of a decrease. This was a blindspot not anticipated during countless user interviews.
Phase 1: Exploration & User Diagnosis
Investigate Developer Friction: Conducted extensive surveys and interviews to quantify the impact of "context switching" on developer productivity.
Identify the Core Pain Point: Pinpointed tool fragmentation as the primary bottleneck, validating the need for a unified interface that could bridge coding environments with management tools.
Phase 2: Solution Architecture & Integration
Design a Bi-Directional Ecosystem: Architected a dashboard capable of not just reading data but executing actions via API integrations with popular developer tools.
Simplify Complex Workflows: Applied design thinking to create a "360-degree view" that allowed managers to track progress while theoretically reducing the daily back-and-forth for developers.
Phase 3: Validation & The Trust Pivot
Measure Real-World Behavior: Deployed the solution to beta users to test the "bi-directional" hypothesis in a live environment.
Uncover the "Trust Gap" Blindspot: Identified a critical psychological barrier where developers, despite earlier feedback, lacked the trust to automate sensitive actions through a third-party tool.
Strategic Pivot: Recognized that the tool inadvertently increased time-on-task rather than decreasing it, prompting a strategic pivot away from the initial execution model led us to start Ninefive.
