The Pattern We Kept Seeing

Over the years, I kept encountering the same failure point—across startups, scale-ups, creative teams, and product orgs.

The tooling would change. The faces would change. But the tension was always the same: smart people, building good things, surrounded by fractured systems.

Engineers were flying blind. PMs were chasing threads. Executives had dashboards, but no context. No one had a clean, high-trust feedback loop between planning, delivery, and outcomes.

The solutions were always partial. A new ticketing system. A smarter standup. A prettier report. Temporary scaffolding for structural misalignment.

That was the backdrop.

Then I met Will.

A casual introduction. A short call. He was deep in the Antler program, looking for a co-founder. I was deep in client work, not looking for another venture.

But we both knew, within the first five minutes, we were circling the same problem.

He came at it from the inside: technical leadership, CTO roles, R&D, teaching AI before it was trendy. I came at it from the outside in: brand, marketing ops, product strategy, and the chaos of non-technical teams managing increasingly technical products.

We didn’t need to explain the problem. We had lived it—just from different vantage points.

By the end of that week, we weren’t pitching each other—we were sketching. Not features. Architectures. Lenses. Systems. We weren’t building another dashboard. We were designing a way of seeing.

Kerni emerged from that sprint. And the more we pushed, the more it made sense.

We weren’t solving a niche problem. We were responding to a structural shift: the move from building software with tight, colocated teams—to managing software across fragmented, distributed, AI-augmented systems. The tools hadn’t caught up. Culture hadn’t caught up. Most teams were still reliant on Slack archaeology, gut decisions, and vibe coding.

Kerni is a counterpunch to all of that.

And while the concept is ambitious, its roots are grounded. This isn’t a moonshot. It’s the product of dozens of failed process docs, derailed sprints, and exhausted teams—looking not for more tools, but a better loop.

That’s how it started. Not as a pitch. Not as a platform play. As a shared frustration, met with urgency, and shaped into something we both needed.

Now, we’re building it for everyone else who needs it too.

Across the board, teams are experiencing the same friction. Product managers are drowning in tabs. Engineers are context-switching across silos. Executives are scanning dashboards and still asking: “How are we tracking?”

The answers aren’t in the metrics. The problem isn’t a lack of tools—it’s a lack of cohesion.

We don’t have a visibility problem. We have an architecture problem. Somewhere along the way, speed overtook structure. Urgency replaced clarity. And teams were left duct-taping together process.

That’s why we built Kerni.

Not another productivity tool. Not another AI chatbot. A layer beneath all of it. A control panel for how software actually gets delivered—not imagined, not estimated. Delivered.

We’ve seen this from both sides. We’ve run lean hybrid teams with offshore devs and minimal documentation. We’ve led growth, product, and design inside environments where decisions outpaced clarity. We’ve played founder, PM, CTO, translator—all at once.

Every time, the same issue emerged: velocity without visibility. Execution without reflection. Tooling with no central intelligence to connect it.

Most teams today are held together with API syncs and blind trust. Jira for tickets. GitHub for code. Slack for comms. Notion for docs. ClickUp for OKRs. Spreadsheets for everything else.

You’d think this would lead to insight. Instead, it leads to noise.

When something breaks—quality, morale, timeline—everyone scrambles to find the “why.” But the system doesn’t track why. It only tracks what.

So we rely on people to fill the gaps. PMs become glue. Engineers become the backchannel. Leadership makes gut calls.

That model doesn’t scale—Build fast, fix it later. It works, until it doesn’t.

When your founding engineer leaves.
When your product velocity stalls.
When your offshore team doesn’t know what changed.
When your CTO is juggling five roles and no one owns the sprint…

You don’t need more dashboards.
You need a system that shows you how your team actually works.

Kerni does that. Quietly. Continuously. Architecturally.

Kerni connects to the tools you already use—GitHub, Jira, Slack, Notion—and interprets the signals flowing through your organisation.

It scores every project across four operational lenses:

• Efficiency

• Quality

• Communication

• Resource Allocation

Each lens visualises trends, flags burnout, surfaces blockers, and produces executive-ready reports.

But this isn’t just tracking. It’s interpretation.

We call them lenses for a reason. Because insight is always about perspective. Are we sprinting or burning out? Is quality robust or fragile? Are we overstaffed or under-allocated? Are comms flowing or fractured?

The goal isn’t metrics.
The goal is narrative.

Because without that, every team looks productive—until it’s not.

Take Airbnb. In its early years, the company ran on hustle, code, and shared memory. But as it scaled, it had to build SmartStack—its internal infrastructure for observability, ownership, and operational health. Not because it wanted to. Because it had to.

Most companies won’t get that chance. Kerni offers them that layer. Now.

And the model works. We’ve seen it in other sectors.WordPress created a universe of plugins and third-party tools that shaped the modern internet. Framer is doing it again—empowering solo builders with systems that used to require teams.

We’re building Kerni in that spirit. As a modular, extensible, AI-native operating layer for how engineering teams actually work.

Structure. Velocity. Clarity.

The system is modular:

• First, we integrate with your stack.

• Then, we score and visualise operational health in real time.

• Finally, we unlock plug-ins: AI co-pilots for sprint planning, executive decks, release notes, reporting tools, and more.

It’s a marketplace. A toolkit. An ecosystem.

And it’s designed to flex. Whether your team is offshore, hybrid, fully colocated, or fully async—Kerni adapts.

Because hybrid teams don’t fail from lack of skill. They fail from lack of context.

Kerni closes that gap.

We’re not chasing the latest GPT wrapper. We’re not here to sell AI fluff.

Kerni uses AI where it matters—under the hood.

It doesn’t just summarise. It maps. It doesn’t just autocomplete. It observes. It learns your rhythms, your blind spots, your bottlenecks—and builds intelligence around your workflows.

The result isn’t another productivity layer. It’s a behavioural mirror—one that reflects how your team actually builds, communicates, and evolves.

Most startups today are overwhelmed by tool FOMO. Too many choices. Too much noise. No cohesive system.

Kerni offers clarity in chaos.
One system.
Four lenses.
A new way to manage engineering.

And we’re just getting started.