Product, according to Jason

Product Vision & Pillars — A Foundation for our Roadmap

I’ve put together a product vision and pillars document and want to share it with the whole team.

The reason to start here rather than just building a roadmap that’s more of a feature list is that features are easier to prioritize — and easier to build — when we have a shared answer to why they matter. The pillars define what Momentum needs to consistently deliver to realize the vision, and they give us a filter for evaluating new work as it comes in. I hope they also give everyone a way to see how the thing you’re working on connects to something bigger than that one ticket or task itself.

The document has four pillars — trust for every participant, clarity through encoded judgment, frictionless data in and out, and every user moves toward outcomes — each with a set of outcome-oriented objectives and some initial examples of how current and planned work maps to them. There’s also a section on our different user types and what each one actually needs from the platform.

I hope that this helps everyone have a better shared understanding of where we’re headed. The main work still ahead is figuring out how we measure and track progress against these pillars, and continuing to map our planned features to them so the connection between day-to-day work and long-term vision is always visible.

Let me know if anything is unclear or doesn’t quite land.

Team Pulse Updates

Two new reports are available in the team-pulse repo: the February productivity analysis and the Q1 retrospective lookback. The February report reflects AI-enabled velocity, good and bad: 385 merged PRs, 627 commits from 6 developers — but also a bug creation rate that more than doubled (36→86). The Q1 lookback synthesizes patterns across four retros and names the core tension: we’re shipping faster than our infrastructure can support. Several action items from January (PagerDuty, pre-launch plan, Sentry alarm process doc) remain open heading into March. Both reports are worth reading as context for the roadmap and pillar discussions.

• Bomee

Metrics

Traction

• Annual Run Rate: $2.91M

Financials

February monthly report below. Descriptions of each metric live in the handbook.

Metric	Value	Takeaway
Revenue (YTD)	$518,300	YTD revenue is up 141% YoY
Transaction fees	$14,203 (2.74% of YTD revenue)	Consistent share of revenue MoM
Annual run rate	$2.91M (+0% MoM)	No increase expected - no new subscriptions in Feb
Cash	$495,755 (+21.5% MoM)	Building back reserves will be slow until all new revenue comes in
YTD Cash In / Out	$490,775 in / $334,546 out	More money in than out = good, not burning through cash
Accounts receivable	$170,387 (-91% MoM)	Invoices paid as expected, AR current except for $36K
Runway	+4 months	Positive runway means we are generating cash - see note below
Net burn (monthly, accrual)	$63,999 (-31% MoM)	Expected - lower salary and consulting spend
Net burn (YTD-to-last-month, cash)	$156,228 (-268% MoM)	Increase expected after AR brought current - see note below

Details

• Revenue: Accrual revenue is $518K but YTD cash revenue is $460K (-11%) this is indicative of some slow-paying customers.
• Annual run rate: Stable for now. We expect this number to increase next month after we invoice for the HPD agreement.
• Cash and AR: Our cash inflow is okay for the moment, but quarterly and bi-annual payments as well as the start of new revenue collections, create lumpy months where we are seemingly flush with cash. It is important for us to ensure our cash out does not outpace our inflows in lean months. Additionally, this is why we want our AR collected on-time by our large customers in particular - a slow-paying customer can strain operations.
• Runway: Once again, our runway is positive, telling us that at our current rate of cash generation, our total assets represent about 4.3 months’ worth of net cash production (in other words, it’s a coverage ratio, not a countdown clock). However, we are not totally there yet - the majority of our cash reserves are in a buffer account, which we need to replenish to maintain a 3-6 month cushion against lean months, slow-paying customers, etc.
• Net burn: The net burn this month is actually a net gain - cash inflows are exceeding our outflows by ~$156K YTD on average. This indicates we are accumulating cash. As mentioned above, we are not there yet - we expect revenue to decrease slightly Q2 onward, which will bring us closer to a break-even number each month.

Current expenses by department

Department	Spend	Explanation of MoM Change
COGS	$22,841 (-28.14% MoM)	Decrease in consulting fees and Fly hosting costs
G&A	$85,028 (+73.77% MoM)	Kirkpatrick Price SOC1/2 payment ($40K)
R&D	$111,417 (+2.36% MoM)	Small changes in benefits and payroll expenses
Sales	$19,775 (-1.02% MoM)	Small changes in benefits and payroll expenses

Development

• Bug Count (P-0 and P-1): 26, but 15 of them are already fixed to go out with Release 116

Last Week’s Highs and Lows

• The Momentum Product Vision and Pillars document and the discussions surrounding it were very helpful to structure our efforts and conversations about where Momentum should go. (FH)
• We shipped a new version of NYSERDA BDP, in which we make sequential cascaded guesses (including ML) -Pillar 2- on building attributes when there are gaps in available data. This is a big milestone not only for this contract, but also to help all our users get results faster -Pillar 4-, with less manual data entry -Pillar 3-, yet with full transparency on data provenance -Pillar 1-. (FH)
• I had a good chat with NineDot about batteries and LL97 compliance. We’ll be adding some energy storage options into Momentum in teh coming months. (JMB)
• The SOC 1 meetings went really well. Kudos to Reuben and Erika for such great prep work! (JMB)
• Congrats to Ana on her “big” 360! (BJ)

Any missing highlights? Please share in Discord comments.

Crow’s Nest

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

François’ List

Repeats:

• To get ready for NYCA launch, we need to project ourselves to a near future were a lot of variables are multiplied by 10-100x. Max number of concurrent users. Size of database backups. Occurrences of Sentry issues. Probability of a malicious actor trying to make us look bad. Let’s be creatively paranoid and prepare the ship!
• We have a lot of “almost there” large features or complex clean-ups that need to land soon: EPA Portfolio Manager v2, new BKB supporting buildings beyond Multi-Family, Building Attribute Guesser for NYSERDA BDP (shipped!), improved tariff support, etc.

Jason’s List

Repeats:

• Improving clarity around our roadmap and prioritization process–I’ve started to meet with a PM coach to help me.
• We may have won some minds, and we’re winning some wallets, but will we win their fingers? Which users will actually use our software instead of just looking for the outputs and expecting consultant-style service?
• What is our moat in a world and industry where data wants to be free, especially when some of our largest customers are city and state agencies?
• Getting a clearer sense of our delivery velocity. I anticipate we’ll need to be more responsive to ad hoc customer feedback this year, and this will help me better plan and prioritize our product needs.

Bomee’s List

• Building the NEW Willdan relationship we know them, but we need to give them a certain amount of grace!
• DDD migration is mid-flight — We’ve refactored a bunch of stuff now, but with AI coding, risk inconsistency if new code gets written in the old pattern while migration is ongoing. Need guardrails!
• PR review as a bottleneck for AI-enabled velocity — As we move faster with AI-assisted development, our review tooling and processes need to keep up. We set the rules for risk-enabled reviews, so now we need to execute, and we might need more? different? test automation.
• NYCA launch readiness — A lot of security, infra, and bug fix work landed last sprint, which has made 116 a monster!
• Livewire 4 stability — We’re still in a transition state.

Erika’s List

• Closing out our agreements and making sure our new accounts receivables are on track - this will also be reviewed during SOC1. In general, the transition from agreement to invoicing could be improved and we need to be paid on time or with less of a lag.
• Onboarding is always top of mind and soon we will have had about six months of contractors, FT, PT and interns who have gone through our updated process. It is a good time to assess and check in on how this could scale and share insights with the team. We’re also at a point where I think it’s important to hear from folks about their growth and ongoing integration in a horizontal organization
• Financial metrics as we scale came to mind as I did this month’s reporting - some other metrics matter more when you are cash flow positive or accumulating cash, such as how many months of coverage is in your reserves and how long is it taking you to collect your AR. I speak about it but will be tracking as well.

On Deck for This Week

• Mike Sweeney (new principal building science engineer) joins this week! (JMB)
• Ilayda Çavuşoğlu (coder) starts Tuesday! (BJ)
• We’re meeting with NYC DOB to discuss their LL97 data to align our methodology and work towards importing important filing data from their system so we can be sure Momentum’s LL97 calculations are the most current. (JMB)

Upcoming Releases

Release 116

• Lots (!!!) of security and infrastructure improvements ahead of NYCA
• Developments
• More support for non-multifamily buildings: data, calculation updates, rebates
• Service provider profiles
• Utility tariff (rate) updates

Please Leave Feedback

Please note your reaction to this update in the Slack channel. It helps us to know what is resonating, what is unclear, etc. Thanks!

• What are your highlights / low-lights?
• Did we miss a highlight? Something else you want to react to?