Work of Working

April 25, 2025

Working on how to work better is still work.

From my POV, we did a lot of that this week, whether it’s the developers working on a new code review / release process, the folks on NYSERDAta laying the PM groundwork, or the folks who contributed ideas to this month’s horizontal meeting:

Work Plan & Feedback Separation - Replace current integrated 360 process with: (1) twice-yearly company-wide work plan updates in January and July, and (2) separate feedback-focused 360 meetings in between.
Monthly Radar Reviews - Discontinue the weekly individual radar updates that few complete. Instead, dedicate time during monthly staff meetings to review and update the company radar together.
Targeted 360 Surveys - Limit the comprehensive survey format to new employee onboarding (30-60-90 day process), while implementing a significantly simplified or alternative feedback mechanism for regular 360s with established employees.
360 Week Implementation - Instead of letting people schedule 360s whenever convenient, establish a designated week each month (e.g., 3rd week) when all scheduled 360s must occur.
Communication Category in Work Plans - Add a specific section to work plans where team members outline their communication approach and information sharing responsibilities, addressing how they will keep others informed about their work and stay updated on relevant company activities.

Please vote on Slack!

Metrics

Unique Buildings: 6,222 (March, +162 MoM)
Annual Run Rate: $1.31M
Monthly net burn (accrual basis): $71,974 (3-month avg through March, -22.57% MoM)
Year-to-last-month net burn (cash basis): $140,356 (-19% MoM)
2025 Transaction fees to date: $9,276
Outstanding invoices as of today: $6,590 (-$90,434 or -93.21% WoW)

Last Week’s Highlights

Productive horizontal meeting! BJ
Unstuck on PRs. I had a bunch of code that was trapped behind the release 93 candidate that are now all in release 93. It’s a freeing feeling. Hopefully a feeling we’ll all have more of with Jeremy’s improved PR process, which debuted this week. BJ
Making the robots work for us. I’m glad to see us using AI to make us more productive. Claude is now open at all times on my desktop and it helps me power through all kinds of stuff. How do we get to be the Claude of multifamily rehabs? BJ
Another good sync-up meeting with NYSERDA on the Building Data Platform. We’re getting more clarity on what has worked for them (Lightbox as data backbone) and didn’t (self-service Heavy.AI, users losing trust because of data issues), and have clear signs that our work will be useful beyond NYSERDA (Metabase demo). FH
Beyond pleasing our SOC 2 gods (reminder: SOC 2 is a security certification we need to earn again every year), our “semi-annual configuration review” meeting helped us uncover possible money savers in our fly.io service configuration. FH
Near finalization of technical content for the MOCEJ-UGC website project - MZ
It is a wonky policy topic… but very interesting development about a potential pilot program to deliver decarbonization upgrades at scale which arguably more closely aligns with our roadmap than anything I have ever seen. Details here (all the more reason we need to learn lessons from what is going down with Climate Friendly Homes per my watch list below) - MZ

Any missing highlights? Please share in Slack comments.

Crow’s Nest

Looking out for icebergs: What are the risks on the horizon that we’re watching for and navigating around?

Bomee’s List

Getting Marc a product he can sell We’re delayed but working on NPV for First Service.
Cash. We have a net burn that we need to minimize. This week, we learned that we will not be making as much from CFHF as we had hoped, tho perhaps a 2026 problem.
NYCA – waiting…still
ConEd Recompete in motion.
The background hum of uncertainty for the housing/construction industry. The predicted recession is not great news.

François’ List

I’m feeling much better about NYSERDA Building Data Platform after the first few meetings (thanks to Robin and Melissa for making them successful), but we still have to make choices pretty quickly that will commit us possibly over the long-term: what external data to buy, what API we want to expose, what dashboarding technology to adopt.
AI Coders. We have a few newish developers/reviewers in the team, and integrating them is both exciting and frankly a little painful. Claude, Korbit, and Copilot each bring value differently, on us to figure out how to make them most efficient.

Jason’s List

NYC Accelerator RFP–this would be a big contract and have impacts on revenue plan and product roadmap.
How can we continue to reduce the barriers to giving users useful information? I’m eager to try scraping data out of pdfs and other documents so we can make it easier to get non-public information. Seems like a lot of potential use for this beyond getting a v0.
Updating our project workflow. We have a better idea of who will be using this now, which is a great start. Now we need to confirm what features they need and those they don’t need. And we need to away from the existing CPC CFHF code asap.
More chatter about adapation > mitigation. This feels both scary at the macro scale–have we missed the tipping point?–but also I think more difficult to streamline with software than decarbonization.
CPC’s Climate Friendly Homes Fund program being capped at $150M instead of $250M. Apparently NYS had to use that money to cover some other projects in need. It’s still going to be a very impactul program, but it ending early is sad for at least a couple of reasons.

Erika’s List

Looking at the healthcare costs and finding a new PEO has raised some questions for me - mainly, will we be stuck with a provider with high, fluctuating annual costs? Feedback from traditional PEO’s such as ADP has been that they cannot underwrite us with annual increases above 35%. We still have options coming in this week and we want to make sure that the cost of healthcare does not impede other things we might want to do.
Looking ahead at our budget and want to make sure we have a good handle on what we are spending and how different activities and events, for example, gaining or losing revenue will impact our runway.

Marc’s List

Pull back by CPC from Climate Friendly Homes makes this program not the proof point for scaling decarbonization upgrades that we and many others were hoping it might become. Perhaps there are other explanations but seems eerily like case studies profiled in the “Abundance” book where well intentioned funds were approved but outcomes were not delivered. A program retro is needed. While Momentum was only a small part of this overall program – I think it is important for the wider industry to understand what should be done differently next time. And also need to make sure Momentum is not in any way tainted by association with any shortcomings of this program.

On Deck for This Week

All-staff meeting on Thurs. Maybe a time we can do our first review of the radar.
Jeremy’s 360!
New health plans for the team to review.
In Wednesday’s release (93):
Internal team kick off call with L&M on portfolio wide screening and heat pump demonstration project that will result in a 6-figure Momentum subscription (MZ)
Training of KC3 team so they can support outreach of standardized retrofit packages for the MOCEJ-UGC website launch (MZ)
In Wednesday’s release (93):

For Project/Program: progress on UI work, database migrations, work on integration with projects, including:
- Created a new controller-based architecture replacing Livewire pages, improving application structure and maintainability
- Improved RFP management system with publish/unpublish functionality and status logging
- Developed an RFP checklist component to guide users
- Added seeders for default program data to ensure proper functioning when testing Projects
- Improved relationship handling between programs and projects to ensure new projects can access program information properly
- Established proper integration between program-level configuration and project-level implementation, setting groundwork for future development
For CPC CFHF: Fix: Fixed an issue where contractors had to refresh the invitation page before being able to send invitations; fixed a problem where the “Submit” button on bid sheets wasn’t appearing after actions without page refreshes; and added confirmation modals to the bid sheet view and contractor pricing pages

Here’s what’s on the Company Radar

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