How Perplexity Computer frees Rho’s product teams from meetings to focus on product quality
120
work hours saved during a 12-week project
100%
adoption among the product development team within a week
90%
reduction in weekly meeting time
Rho is a business financial platform offering corporate credit cards, treasury, spend management, and accounting automation to direct-to-consumer brands, startups, and publicly traded enterprises. From day-zero incorporation to over 10,000 employees, companies can get up and running fast, and grow into additional features as they need.
The Problem
Keeping a cross-functional team on the same page
Rho’s business banking platform allows companies to manage their finances so they can scale up efficiently. But as Rho’s own business expanded, they had some growing pains. When the cross-functional product development team started building a new invoicing module, a complex, multi-month project, they found themselves struggling to make informed decisions and keep everyone in the loop.
Software engineers Oktawian Jurkiewicz and Konrad Keska already knew the root problem. Project information was scattered across a number of different tools, including Notion, Jira, Figma, Slack, Google Docs, and recorded meetings. Updates and changes noted in one tool weren’t always reflected in the others. Nobody had time for the tedious work of collecting and documenting all the latest decisions. “We needed transparency,” says Konrad Keska, a software engineer on the project, “not just for people on the team, but also for managers and others in the company.”
The team also needed to help non-technical people understand the technical impact of design changes. “When the design team made changes in Figma,” says Oktawian Jurkiewicz, another project software engineer, “we needed a way to expose any technical blockers right away.”
The Solution
Streamlining and improving group communication
After learning about how Computer connects to the tools that Rho uses every day and can complete tasks based on company context, they decided to try it.
Oktawian was especially interested in Computer’s ability to work on tasks in the cloud asynchronously. “You don’t even have to have your computer turned on for it to do something for you,” he says. That means it can work outside of business hours, completing tasks overnight, and delivering the results first thing the next morning.
Creating a daily digest in Slack with Computer
Computer has streamlined the product development process at Rho. Oktawian and Konrad created an ongoing workflow in Computer designed to keep the team in sync on the latest changes from design, engineering, product management and quality assurance (QA).
Every night, Computer reads all the mentions of the invoicing product in Slack, Notion, Jira, Figma, and Google Docs to identify inconsistencies, changes, comments, and updates. Then, it produces a daily Slack digest that the team likens to a newspaper’s front page, ready when team members log in the next day. “It collects all the changes that happened the previous day, as well as a list of suggested missing tasks,” Konrad says. “So, if we miss something, Computer highlights it.” Everyone on the team now reviews the news in Slack on their own timeline and can chat with colleagues about questions or concerns in the same Slack channel. Communication is centralized rather than being dispersed across different channels.
Assessing the technical impact of design changes
Computer is also helping tighten the feedback loop between engineers and designers. Now, whenever designers make a design change in Figma, Computer catches it, measures the likely effect from a technical perspective, and sends a Slack message to the shared channel. “It greatly simplified cooperation with the design team,” says Oktawian, “helping us understand each other, what is technically feasible, and what requires significant effort from the technical team.”
Oktawian says what’s especially helpful is how Computer is building memory on the project as it goes, helping the team to complete tasks. “We didn’t define it,” he says. “Computer figured out which data points it should store from each source.”
Use case: Create a daily digest on product development
Example query: Create a daily report for our new fintech product. Check Figma, Notion, and Jira so that you can document all decisions, find and flag any mismatches in the requirements, and report on anything that changed in the last 24 hours. When the report is done, send it as a detailed message to the team in the project Slack channel.
The Result
Improved efficiency and product quality
Computer’s daily Slack digest has become a kind of automated project manager for the product development team. They’ve cut meeting time by 90%, reducing weekly syncs from 2.5 hours to just 15 minutes without losing alignment. Konrad and Oktawian estimate that, with an average of five people on the call each day, Computer saved 120 hours over a 12-week project. “That’s an additional three weeks of time we can invest in other things,” says Oktawian. The team says they’re able to devote more time to making the new product even stronger.
Canceling that daily meeting has also given the team more focused work time and improved project transparency for everyone by making the latest status clearer and more accessible.
Plus, Computer has helped ensure product quality by uncovering some issues in the product requirements documents. “Without Computer’s automation highlighting inconsistencies, we might have had to cut something later on, or fix the resulting bug,” Konrad says.
Computer has worked so well for Rho that the company is planning to have it scan and report on even more apps. “We’d like to broaden Computer’s scope to include even more of our tools, like issue trackers and other monitoring systems such as Log Rocket, Sentry, and Incident.io,” says Konrad.
Tips for improving product development workflows
Tip 1 – Connect your core tools first
Start with your three most critical tools, like Figma for design, Notion for requirements, and Jira for tasks. Ask Computer to monitor all of them for inconsistencies and changes. As Computer begins to work for you, you can fine-tune your queries and add more tools to its scope.
Tip 2 – Send a daily summary to Slack
Set up Computer to post a daily summary in a shared Slack channel that captures everything that changed in your project apps the previous day: comments, design changes, task updates, etc. The regular update can reduce meetings, giving everyone async transparency without leaving Slack.
Tip 3 – Use impact ratings for cross-functional work
Ask Computer to rate the technical ramifications of design decisions before they’re finalized. It can help engineers stay on top of changes and surface issues early, and help designers understand the technical complexity of what might seem like a simple request.
