Most leaders can tell you exactly where their money is going. Far fewer can tell you exactly how their teams are spending their time.

When we started Span, we kept coming back to one idea: we understand intellectually that time is our most precious resource, but it’s the least understood.

It’s shocking how many leaders operate with robust financial systems but near-zero visibility into where time actually goes.

That’s not because they don’t care. As Peter Drucker said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” And time has simply been too difficult to measure — so it’s remained unmanaged. We act like it’s an infinite resource.

I’ve felt this firsthand. Your team grows. Context fades. Priorities multiply. Suddenly you’re not sure what people are working on, whether it’s aligned with company goals, or whether you even have the capacity to deliver on what you’ve committed to.

It’s not a failure of effort. It’s a failure of visibility.

Some call this the paradox of time: we understand its value, but our behavior often tells a different story, as we let low-value tasks crowd out the things that matter most.

Time is the one thing you never get back. It's time we treat it like it matters.

Garbage in, garbage out

The systems we’ve relied on to track engineering work are fundamentally broken. They depend on ticket hygiene, manual tags, and process friction — all of which erode under scale.

Ask 100 engineers to define “KTLO,” and you’ll get 100 answers. If we can’t agree on inputs, we can’t trust the outputs.

That’s why we built Span differently. We analyze the work itself - not what people report at the end of a time period, but what they’re actually working on. Your code, Jira, incident management, calendars — we ingest it all, preprocess it, and use LLMs to classify and benchmark it into a consistent, high-fidelity engineering work graph.

It’s the first time you can actually see where engineering time goes. Not in vague buckets. But in real, usable, decision-grade data. 

Time tells the truth

Here’s what happens when you can finally see your time:

• You realize how much work is happening off-roadmap.

• You see where maintenance is eating into innovation.

• You spot teams operating beyond capacity.

• You can see workstreams that might be late to start, avoiding collisions downstream

• You see whether you’re staffing is aligned with your priorities.

This isn’t about micromanagement. As the CTO of a $30B company told me recently, having insight into the work helps him avoid tapping teams for status updates and unnecessary meetings.

It’s about self-awareness.

Span gives teams a mirror. Leaders reallocate with confidence. Tradeoffs get clearer. Platform teams can finally advocate for foundational work that often gets ignored.

But work doesn’t just live in code and tickets. A meaningful share of engineering time is lost before anyone ever opens an editor. Our calendar intelligence highlights where time quietly evaporates: fragmented days, meeting creep, and lost “maker time.”

Paul Graham famously wrote that for developers, meetings don’t just interrupt work. In many cases, a single meeting can break an entire day.

One early Span customer discovered that their highest-impact engineers were carrying nearly twice the meeting load of their peers. Not because the work required it, but because recruiting had pulled them into more interview loops. With Span, they redistributed the load. Those engineers got hundreds of hours back each year, without slowing hiring or burning out the team.

Why now

LLMs finally solve the taxonomy problem. They standardize work classifications across teams and companies, which is something that’s never been possible before.

That means we can finally build benchmarks for engineering work, the way we’ve had benchmarks for financials forever.

As one of our early design partners put it: this is the first-ever P&L of engineering time.

And in a moment where every company is being asked to do more with less, how we spend time matters more than ever.

Span gives us a level of visibility we’ve never had before. It shows exactly what our teams are working on and how that effort ladders up to our biggest priorities, so we can focus talent where it matters most.

 – Oran O’Dowd, VP of Engineering at Intercom

This is the real AI transformation

Real transformation isn’t just about speeding up the work itself, it’s about knowing if we’re focused on the right work. If your teams are underwater, misaligned, or buried in unplanned work, AI speed gains won’t move the needle.

The real unlock is operational clarity. Where is time going? Are we staffed against our strategy? Do we have the capacity to deliver what we’ve promised?

Span helps teams get honest about how they’re spending time, and shift from reactive to intentional. If that’s something you’re thinking about, we’d love to show you.