A team layer with no leaderboard in it
The parts of a team that never fit on a ticket. People post, thank each other in a way that stands permanently, keep a run going without racing anybody, and find out what shipped. Every number that could become a ranking was deliberately left out.
Three ways a team layer turns into a scoreboard
It starts as encouragement and ends as a table people are ranked in at review time.
Praise lives in a chat room and is scrolled past by Thursday, so nothing of it survives the quarter.
A fortnight off, a public holiday or a Saturday breaks the run, so the honest thing to do is not take the leave.
One box, and everything in the sentence
A post is a single text box. Type @ to name a colleague, # to tag it, and paste a link where it belongs in the sentence. The server reads the tags, the links and the mentions back out of the words afterwards, so there is nothing to fill in twice.
Attach up to five files, at most 50MB each and 80MB across the post. Images open in a viewer with arrows and a counter, video plays in the card it was posted in, and one video plays at a time. An Instagram or Facebook video link becomes a player that loads nothing until somebody presses play. What you are about to post shows as thumbnails with a remove button each, and an iPhone photo is turned into a JPEG before it uploads.
- The feed is live: posts, kudos, comments and reactions appear for everyone with it open, without a reload
- Reference an issue, a feature or change request or a task, checked against what the reader may see
- Five fixed reactions with no weight and no ranking, and comment threads one level deep
- Everyone you name is told, in the evening too, and editing afterwards never notifies again
Shipped the Safari export fix, screenshots attached
Two a month, and what you said stands
Everyone gets two kudos a month, so thanking somebody costs something and cannot be sprayed. None of it rolls over. A reason is required: a kudos with no words is a number, and numbers are what this feature exists to avoid.
A kudos is permanent. The giver may reword the reason for five minutes and after that it stands, and there is no delete for the giver, the recipient, a moderator or an administrator. That is the whole point of it being worth receiving.
- It appears in the feed as its own card, and the person you thanked is told
- My Kudos holds your own history in both directions, and only you can read it
- No categories, no scores, no top recipients, and nothing that adds up to a per-person total
1 of 2 left this month
Reword the reason for five minutes. No delete, for anyone.
A run you keep, not a race you enter
A day counts when you move at least one work item, and only the current month is tracked, so there is no all-time table to climb and nothing to protect over Christmas. Your streak is yours: the figure is read from your own identity and there is no way to ask for anybody else's.
Weekends, public holidays for your office and approved leave are neutral. They neither count as worked nor cost you anything. On top of that, two quiet working days are forgiven, and today never spends one of them, so a streak cannot die at nine in the morning.
- Public holidays are kept per office, synced daily, with manual overrides in the admin panel
- Share this month's run to the feed if you want to, with the number recomputed on the server
- Ask once a month for a day back when something the calendar did not know about got in the way
Team totals, and never a person
Team Pulse reads how the whole team is doing: items closed week by week, the reopen rate over the trailing four weeks, kudos given and how many people took part, and the posts drawing the most conversation. Four to twelve weeks, and that window is the only thing you can change.
It cannot be drilled into, and not as a matter of policy. The delivery queries never select who did the work, so no code path could group by person even if somebody asked for it, and the kudos block returns participation without ever returning who gave what.
- A separate permission from the feed, denied to every role until somebody grants it deliberately
- Most-discussed posts are ranked by comments, never by reactions
- Streak figures appear nowhere on it, because a streak is a private thing about one person
Team Pulse · last 4 weeks
Presence where it answers a real question
In a chat room, members carry a green dot while they have that conversation open and the header counts how many are in it, so you know whether the client is reading before you type the long reply. An empty room says nothing rather than reporting zero.
On the feed, an Active now card lists colleagues who are in the app right now, which means a screen in front of them and input in the last few minutes, up to twelve faces with the rest folded into a count. It refreshes about once a minute and stops while the tab is in the background.
- Whoever runs the admin panel sees the users list with online now and when each person was last seen
- Active now is colleagues only, so a client account can never appear on it
- Somebody nothing has ever been seen from reads as offline, with nothing to backfill
12 faces, and 3 more
In the app, on screen, in the last few minutes. Colleagues only.
Telling people things, and asking for days
When a version goes live, the people told are the ones who have not opened the app for a set number of days, because everybody else already saw it. They get it in the app, on their phone and in their inbox. The window is set in the admin panel and can be switched off. Separately, anyone granted it can write a notice to the whole internal team, with email as a per-notice choice. Both land on one Announcements page, newest first.
Leave is asked for in the team workspace: a first day, a last day, both counted, and an optional reason. One request covers at most 31 days, within 90 days either side of today, and three can be waiting on an answer at once. Decisions are made in the admin panel and arrive as a notification.
- Nothing here reaches a client account, in either direction
- A release notice is a record nobody can edit or delete; a notice from a person can be taken down
- Approved leave writes the neutral days onto the streak, so time off never breaks a run
Announcements
A pill that says whether you are about, and a feed that can be funny
A status pill in the top bar reads Available, Busy or Away. It sets itself to Busy while you are in a meeting or running a timer, and when the automatic answer is the wrong one you can set it for an hour, for four, or for the rest of the day. Colleagues see the same dot beside your name in chat and on the home widgets, and anybody who has hidden their presence in Settings simply has none.
Posts take a GIF as well as an image, a video, tags and mentions, which is the difference between a feed people write to and a feed people are asked to write to. GIFs in posts are a staff thing, like the rest of it: none of the feed is visible to a client.
- Busy sets itself, and Rest of the day ends at 7:00 PM, or at 7:00 PM tomorrow when set after hours
- Online needs input in the last five minutes, so a desk left for lunch goes grey
- The Active now card counts colleagues only, and a client account is never on it
- Announcements reach internal accounts only. There is no client-facing noticeboard, and nothing here can be sent to a client portal.
- Leave has no balances, allowances or leave types, and no shared team leave calendar: a request is a range of days and a reason.
- No calendar integration for leave. Approved days pause a streak and nothing is written to anybody's diary.
- The files on a post are fixed once it is written. The wording, and the tags, links and people read out of it, can all be edited.
- Team Pulse covers delivery, reopens and kudos. Time tracked is not on it, and stays on the project's own Time tab.
The things teams ask about this
Can a kudos be taken back?
No, and that is deliberate. The giver can reword the reason for five minutes to fix a typo, and after that it stands. There is no delete for the giver, the recipient, a feed moderator or an administrator, and there is no route in the API that would perform one. A thank you somebody can quietly withdraw is not worth receiving, so the product refuses to make it withdrawable.
Does any of this turn into a leaderboard?
No. Kudos are never aggregated into a per-person score, there are no top recipients and no ranking. Reactions have no weight and no order that means anything. Streaks are capped at the current month, so there is no all-time number to climb, and they are read from your own identity with no way to ask for anybody else's. Team Pulse reports team totals and never selects who did the work.
Can a client see the feed, the kudos or the streaks?
No, and it is enforced three times over rather than hidden. These screens exist only in the team workspace, the feed permission is denied outright on the client role, and the eligibility rule behind mentions, the who-is-around card and the kudos recipient list requires an internal account. A client cannot be named in a post, appear in Active now, or be sent a company notice.
What happens to a streak while somebody is on leave?
Nothing. Approved leave days are neutral: they are not days you worked and they do not spend either of the two quiet working days a streak forgives, so a fortnight off leaves the run exactly where it was. Weekends and public holidays for that person's office already behave the same way. The days are written when the leave is approved, so nothing has to be repaired afterwards.
Who is told when a new version ships?
Only the people who were not there to see it. Anyone who has not opened the app for a set number of days, seven unless somebody changes it, gets a notification, a push and an email pointing at the Announcements page. Everybody else gets nothing, because they were already in the app when it happened. The whole thing can be switched off from the admin panel.
Does leave here replace an HR system?
No. There are no balances, no allowances, no leave types and no accrual: a request is a range of days and a reason, and the record is what was asked for and what was answered. Nothing is written to a calendar and no diary is updated. Its one effect on the rest of the product is that approved days pause a streak.
Can a moderator edit somebody else's post?
No. A role granted moderation on the feed can delete any post, and who took it down is recorded, but it can never change the words. Editing a post is the author's alone. A kudos card is refused to moderators too, for the same reason it is refused to everybody.
Where this connects to the rest of it
See it against your own work
Thirty minutes on a call, one of your real client projects on the screen, and an honest answer about whether this part of the product earns its place in how you work.
partnerships@dhcertainty.com