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.