Northwind found two engineers' worth of misattributed hours in their first month

A remote-first product team made the engineering org's time legible without making engineers fill in forms.

The challenge

Northwind is a 110-person product company building developer infrastructure. Engineering teams were fully distributed across five timezones, and project managers were doing what every PM in that situation does: guessing what people were working on, asking for status updates in Slack, and trying to reconcile capacity from sprint boards that lagged reality by 1–2 weeks.

The leadership team didn't want time sheets. They didn't want surveillance. What they did want was a way to see, at the project level, where engineering hours were actually landing — without making any individual engineer fill in a single field.

Why Huble

Huble's activity capture model — passive, with screenshots off by default and URL capture opt-in per project — let the team turn on rollup visibility without changing any individual engineer's day. The desktop app ran quietly in the background and the data flowed up to project-level dashboards that PMs and EMs could actually read.

In the first month, we discovered that one team was spending 30% of their hours on a project nobody had asked them to work on. That was eight months of cumulative drift we never would have caught.

— Jonas L., Engineering Manager

The result

320 misattributed engineering-hours got reattributed in the first month — a finding that more than paid for the first year of Huble across the org. PMs got 6 hours per week back from "status meeting" tax. And the engineering team noticed approximately nothing changed about their day.

What's next

Northwind is rolling out cross-team capacity forecasting in Q3, with the goal of giving each EM a six-week-ahead view of where their team's hours will land before they're committed.