Empower your engineers with meaningful and data-driven 1:1s
how are you is a holistic, developer-first solution for running meetings with your software engineers.
Give hay a try
Happy, engaged, and motivated developers turn good companies into great ones
Run your 1:1s the right way - with hay!
Act on automated insights
hay does the heavy lifting for you with system-generated insights. Populate your meeting agenda with automated talking points. Speed up your 1:1 prep work with recommended action plans.
Grow & Develop
Professional development is a never-ending quest for software engineers. Help your engineers find purpose in their work with mentoring and goal-setting, sprint by sprint or project by project! Track their growth in real time and see how their new skills speed up delivery.
Analyze work outputs
Are your developers working long hours? Taking too few breaks? Or maybe fitting too much code into a single commit? Understand how work gets done and quickly identify patterns that could result in bottlenecks.
Check on mood & wellbeing
Foster a culture of honesty, engagement, and open communication. Detect burnout before it impacts productivity or you lose your best talent. Have meaningful conversations that help your developers stay balanced, focused, and happy.
Get feedback
Software development is a team effort. Whether you’re working remotely or in-office, gathering feedback and sharing praise improves performance, creates a sense of trust and unity, and helps your engineering teams reach their targets.
Improve competencies
Check out who’s working on what project and with what tech stack. Find out if you need to pair up engineers or create knowledge transfers to increase bus factor. Challenge your engineers to try other programming languages that will help them develop an underutilized skill set.
Level up your 1:1s in software engineering
Our engineering managers scoured the Internet for tools that make running 1:1s easier and faster.
The goal was to find an all-in-one platform (with templates, insights, and generated talking points) that would help us discuss wellbeing, feedback, and growth without sacrificing a view of work output and productivity.
We also wanted to run fair and transparent progress checks free from ego and based on data and objective principles. We were surprised to learn that there was nothing on the market that 1) holistically merged all these features and 2) would help us overcome the challenges of leading engineers in modern software development.
So, we decided to build it ourselves!
how are you helps engineering managers run authentic, meaningful, and progress-driven 1:1s with their developers. It does this by nurturing a context-rich environment, where you can give and receive constructive feedback, assess goals, monitor wellbeing, and coach your engineers on personal and career growth.
Lessons learned from putting your developers first 🌱
We created hay based on market research and our own past experiences. We’ve discovered that a healthy 1:1 culture needs to consider the following 3 points:
Reviews are for movies and books, not people
Let’s face it, performance reviews suck! They’re too conventional, rigid, and do nothing to help developers - your most important asset - thrive and perform better. That’s why we’ve decided to give reviews a rethink (we call them development conversations!).As the most important touchpoint between engineer and manager, how are you ensures that engineers are happy working on their projects, writing their best code, vibing well with teammates, and looking forward to further growth and other challenges. We’re all about helping engineers connect the dots, not focus too much on standalone milestones!
We don’t do ‘apples to apples’ comparisons
We’re a tool of empowerment and engagement. We’re not concerned about which engineer committed the most code or conducted the most reviews in a sprint. In our experience, leaderboards tend to hurt company culture. We provide tools and data that allow engineers to compare themselves today to the engineers they were yesterday.
Software development is a creative, sustained, people process
Writing code starts with great leaders communicating the needs and wants of concerned stakeholders. If this vital process lacks clarity, empathy, and openness, then morale drops, burnout sets in, and project failure becomes a reality.
It’s about time you show your software developers that you care
Replace traditional performance reviews with engineering-focused development conversations - with how are you!
Give hay a try