City by the Sea
We prioritize questions.
We read the channels your company already works in, pull out the questions that are still open, and rank them on one list — for the people and for the agents.
Scroll for the questions this raises.
It lets a group of people coordinate with a group of agents.
Questions are the real unit of knowledge work.
Agents are exposing this right now: they perform more and more of the tasks, and the human is left with the decisions.
Tasks keep the overhead we have always had.
Someone breaks the work down, hands it out, and follows it up. With agents it gets worse, not better — people take the tasks and babysit their agents through them.
Everything that actually decides it.
The reply may take twenty minutes to write. Under it sit the questions that decide what it says — and the task shows none of them. On a question list, the real work is visible.
Does she need the transaction logs, or is schema review enough?
openDo we tell her about the logging gap now, or after we've fixed it?
openIs the extra work billable, or goodwill?
openEvery open question on one list, ranked — the most important one wins your attention.
Read the channels
We read the channels your company already works in and pull out the questions that are still open.
Prioritize the list
The questions compete for attention. What matters most sits at the top — of your list, and of the company’s.
People and agents divide it
Agents take the questions whose answers can be found. People take the ones that need judgment — and review what the agents bring back.
You arrive to a ranked list of questions, prepared for you.
Not ten minutes of waiting, then a round of feedback, then ten minutes more. Nobody sits babysitting an agent — and no agent sits waiting on a person.
Itself.
A person has their own list. So does the team, the department, the whole company. Each list exposes the real knowledge work at that level — what is actually being worked on.
Not in execution. In front of it.
Execution scales now — when a company needs more, it can buy more. Judgment does not scale like that. Making sense of things, making the decisions, coordinating on them: that stays with people, and almost none of our tools are about that work.
To-do lists hide it. That is why we prioritize questions.
Two products, both named for finding the way.
Varða
varða — a cairn: stones raised along the route so travellers cross the highlands without losing the way.
The question list itself — gathered from your channels, ranked, and split between the people and the agents.
Explore VarðaViti
viti — a lighthouse: the fixed light that tells you where you are, and what lies ahead.
The engine that does the ranking — pointed at a company’s questions, or at any knowledge space: what do I need to know?
Explore VitiAnd the name?
City by the Sea — the old way of doing business: the harbour town, where the day’s work was visible from the dock and the people who knew made the calls.