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20 Comments

Just your honest opinion on my project (✔️ or ❌)

Does Managiness (allows product owners to monitor browser activity their managers) have potential? I'm kind of not sure if it worths the time to work on it further.

Please, leave ✔️ or ❌ in the comments below. Thoughts also are appreciated!

  1. 6

    ❌If I worked at a place or had a client that asked me to install this I would be looking elsewhere for employment.

    1. 2

      ❌ For sure! I would not want to work at a company that did not trust my ability or my teams ability to do our job. There are so many, more personable way to get a better result out of workers. They are people. Don't treat them like a data point.

      (not o mention the massive uphill battle you would have from an "anti-privacy" tracking system that companies would force employees to use. With the world and legislature going more restrictive on privacy and tracking. This would be super hard to keep fueled and growing)

    2. 1

      Yup, gotta agree here. Maybe adjust your messaging a bit so that it's meant as a self-improvement thing where the end-user is the only one looking at their reports and seeing where they could improve. But that's just an idea.

      Otherwise, if someone wants something like this, seems interesting!

    3. 1

      Thanks for your opinion!

  2. 3

    • I think a workplace that needs this sounds terrible 😅
    • You should work with people you can trust
    • This would (fortunately) be easy to circumvent by using private browsing / another browser
    • Is browser history really linked with productivity/results/success?
    1. 1

      What about freelancers that you work with not through freelance platforms?

  3. 2

    ✔️✔️✔️
    but I think the email report feature is necessary from the very beginning

    1. 1

      I agree with that, but to do that means quite more effort for MVP without validation.

  4. 1

    If this is intended for on-premise use in businesses, then I don't think this would be the best solution for what you're trying to achieve. Cloud-based and on-premise web content filtering and reporting already exists and is much more difficult to bypass than a Chrome extension. Lots of companies are already going to have some web proxy/content filter that can do reporting. What's to stop users from disabling the extension? You can force the installation of Chrome extensions via group policy or Google Admin Console, but they could use another browser or their phone.

    If it is for remote workers, how will you get permission to install software on their devices? If the devices are the company's property, you can always force polices down to the devices with an MDM solution. Again, though, lots of MDM solutions already have reporting on web activity built-in.

    Being constructive, have you ever thought of pivoting to an education setting where this sort of practice is commonplace? Chromebooks are also used extensively in education, so an extension might be a cheap alternative to a full-blown web filtering solution.

  5. 1


    Sorry, but any surveillance like this is not acceptable (to me).
    I don't think it creates any culture within the company, nor it would motivate anyone.

    Although I first thought that it has a twist, that employees are monitoring their managers to keep them accountable. :D Still, surveillance = lack of trust.

    1. 2

      looks like nobody faced the problems I faced as a business owner :D anyway good points, thanks for this!

      1. 1

        I would be lying if I would say that I didn't face those problems, but it was just because either I hired wrong people or had a wrong mindset about how to approach accountability within the team/company.

        1. 1

          So how did you handle it eventually?

          1. 1

            Change of mindset and approach. Thought about this a lot, why I have trust issues with my employees, etc. With some I was able to discuss those concerns (we were a small team back then) and resolve it, with some I had to part away.

            It is not easy to create a culture where people are accountable and it largely depends on the people you work with and how much they are responsible for their tasks (ownership). But it is all worth it at the end.

            Therefore, if you have issues with your managers that you hire, learn to trust them and give them work they can be solely responsible/accountable for. It gives them freedom too, to execute better. Gut feeling when hiring is worth listening too, how well you connect with that person.

            1. 1

              Thanks for the advice, very helpful! Maybe you are right the problem is in my head only :)

              1. 1

                You are welcome :)

  6. 1

    ❌ as a techincal user it's clean I can bypass a browser extension that does that
    ❌ This is micro management, and while some do that out of instinct it's not a good business practice (I understand you would probably be able to sell it to some)
    ❌ Hopefully most of your managers work isn't browser work

    1. 1

      It seemed to me this idea makes sense for those who deal with freelance managers, whose work in most cases is around the browser, and work efficiency is measured only by the end result. The hypothesis is that it will be more advantageous for a product owner to detect an unscrupulous manager at an early stage of cooperation; the second is that under the supervision of a big brother, an employee will work more efficiently a priori.

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