We built a team tracking tool, but I absolutely hate micromanagement. Here is my dilemma.
Let’s be honest: Most employee tracking software is spyware. Screen recording every 5 minutes, mouse movement tracking... it destroys trust.
When we started building Trackly, the biggest challenge wasn't the code. It was the philosophy. How do you give founders/managers the data they need to keep things running, without making the team feel like they are in a digital prison?
We wanted to focus on accountability, not policing.
But now I'm curious—where do you draw the line? Is team monitoring inherently toxic, or is there a "healthy" way to do it?
If you manage a remote team, what’s the one feature that would make you use a tool like this, and what’s the one feature that would make you instantly quit a job if forced to use it?
Roast my philosophy.
The best part is that you’re focusing on accountability rather than policing. If a tool can actually help highlight blocks or show high-level progress without spying, it becomes a win for the developer, not just the manager. It protects our flow state while keeping stakeholders happy.
I’d draw the boundary at work-state evidence, not body or screen proxies. Commitments, blockers, handoff age, and missed dependencies can help both the team and manager. Screenshots, keystrokes, mouse movement, and silent capture measure presence while creating adversarial behavior. A strong product rule could be: if the employee cannot see, correct, and benefit from the same signal, do not collect it. Which buyer are you optimizing for first: the manager who wants predictability or the team member who wants fewer interruptions?
Brother, our app has benefits for both sides. First, the benefit for the manager is that they will maintain visibility over their team. They will be able to track attendance, location, and the actual work, so they can identify who has too heavy of a workload and help reduce it. These are all benefits for them.
For the team, the benefit is transparency regarding the data shown to the manager. They can see exactly how they are being tracked, what specific data is being collected, and at what times. Because of this, they can easily avoid coming under any negative scrutiny. The app is simply designed to keep the team alert and mindful, which is actually very useful.
This tension is real and I don't think there's a clean way out of it, just tradeoffs.
Tracking tools built around activity, keystrokes, time in app, hours logged, basically always drift into micromanagement no matter how good the intentions were at launch.
Tracking tools built around decisions and outcomes, what got decided and why, tend to age better because they're useful even when nobody's watching.
If you can, I'd lean the product toward the second kind.
Managers stop needing to check on people once they can just read what happened and why, instead of needing someone to report status.
Our app actually has all the kinds of features you are expecting. Honestly, making things difficult for the staff is entirely in the hands of the management. No matter what tool you give them, if they intend to micromanage or create problems, they will find a way to do it anyway. Our goal is simply to make things easier.
I'd draw the line at outcomes versus activity. Screen time tells you someone was present, not that anything got done. Feature that'd make me use it: flag when an outcome is missing or late. Feature that'd make me quit: anything screenshotting my screen. I think about this a lot because FounderFlow does something similar for founders instead of employees, looks at outcomes across my businesses rather than time spent looking busy. Good instinct to focus on accountability over policing.
A spreadsheet could easily do this job, so what would be the point of building a dedicated tool? If an owner uses a tracking tool for their own peace of mind, that is their right because they are the ones paying the staff. As for focusing purely on tasks, what is the guarantee that the employee actually completed the task themselves rather than paying someone else to do it?
We aren't saying that every single thing should be tracked. With our tool, we simply show your working time as a percentage to indicate how much work was actually done during the day. Furthermore, this tracking isn't only visible to the manager; the staff members themselves can also see exactly what they did and how their work is being tracked.
Fair pushback, and the staff-visible part is the detail that changes it for me, that's what separates accountability from surveillance. My comment was really about my own use case (tracking follow-ups across businesses, not people), not a knock on time tracking as a category. The percentage framing plus mutual visibility seems like a reasonable middle ground for teams that actually want it.
A tool cannot judge the final outcome of work, nor can AI tell whether a task has been fully completed. Trying to do that would only double the workload: first, you would have to inform the tool about what the task is, and then a human would have to measure it against the tool's input making it a tedious daily chore.
In reality, evaluating outcomes is management's job, not a tool's, and managers already do this. What management can't easily see, however, is how much effort went into that outcome whether the employee worked hard or had an easy time with it. Management can decide that while the outcome itself is high-quality, the employee also put in significant time and effort according to the tracking app, which deserves extra appreciation.
A dedicated and hardworking employee actually wants their effort to be visible so they can be recognized and valued for it.
Effort tracking answers a different question than outcome tracking, and there is not a clean way to merge them without picking a side. For employees, the manager is the check on effort versus outcome. For a founder running the business alone, there is no manager to do that check, the founder is also the only one watching. That is the specific gap I spend most of my time thinking about, not because tracking employee effort is wrong, but because nobody is building the equivalent for the person at the top.
But in my opinion, tracking just the outcome is impossible because the app would need to be as skilled as the team member performing the task. Therefore, a software tasked with determining whether a job is complete must have all the information about how that task is executed, what steps are involved, and how much effort it requires. Even your AI cannot do this. Because humans have different working styles and do things in their own unique ways, it would be difficult for any app to accurately judge whether a task has actually been completed or not. If you are just saying that it should display a checklist and a timer, which they can simply tick off to notify the manager or founder that the task is done, then there is no need for a dedicated app this can easily be done on WhatsApp or a spreadsheet.
You are right to some extent. A solo founder handles all these things themselves, and it is true that they primarily just want to see the outcomes without getting involved in exactly how the team is doing the work. But our app isn't built exclusively for them either. I do agree, however, that there is definitely a gap for that kind of app, and there should be a tool focused purely on tracking outcomes.
That being said, our app is highly customizable, and you can adjust it however you prefer. My point is simply that a tool is just meant to create convenience. If people misuse it or impose unnecessary restrictions on their own, that is not the tool's fault. Our tool does not strictly enforce things like tracking or screenshots; instead, it leaves it entirely up to the owner or manager to decide how they want to use it.
Customization solves the configuration problem, not the incentive problem. If a tool shows effort as a percentage, someone will eventually optimize for the percentage instead of the work itself, no matter how it is framed. That is not a critique of Trackly specifically, it is what happens to any metric once people know it is being watched. The founders I talk to who handle this well end up caring less about how present someone was and more about what actually got decided or moved forward that day. Does Trackly show that layer at all yet, or is it still mostly a presence signal?
If someone is optimizing themselves for a percentage, that is a good thing; what is wrong with that? At least it is better than wasting time. For a person who is already hardworking, it is not a problem at all. If you set a performance metric and people start working according to it, that is a positive thing. Besides, checking the quality is the job of the manager or founder anyway.
This is exactly what we want: the team should feel they are being watched so they remain active. A founder is absolutely concerned about whether the work was actually done and if things are moving forward. But what if someone falsely shows the founder that progress is being made when, in reality, it isn't? The manager might just believe it. However, if they have a way to verify that the work was genuinely done, they can determine if the person is actually telling the truth.
"The team should feel they are being watched so they remain active" is the line that worries me most here. There is a real difference between a metric that reflects an outcome and a metric that changes behavior only because it is being watched. Once people know a number is tracked, they start managing the number, not the job. A hardworking person does not need surveillance to stay hardworking, they need clear priorities. The harder question is not whether someone is telling the truth, it is why a manager needs a percentage to find that out instead of just looking at what actually shipped.
What part of your approval process takes the most time? Trying to understand if this is a universal pain.
To be honest, with Trackly, we are trying to keep things as automated and friction-free as possible to avoid heavy approval bottlenecks.
However, from what we've seen in the market, the biggest pain point in traditional team management is the manual review process—managers having to constantly cross-check logged hours against actual task completion to ensure everything aligns. We want to eliminate that back-and-forth by providing transparent daily productivity percentages that both the manager and the employee can see upfront.
Are you currently building a tool to solve workflow or approval bottlenecks?
Yes, I built something in the approval space. Trackly looks interesting — are you planning to add approval workflows, or staying focused on productivity tracking? Curious about your roadmap.
What exactly are approval workflows, and how can they help us? Also, in terms of tracking, by the way, we do have a partnership program as well that offers a 20% commission every month for as long as the user keeps using it.