Leadership · Circo

Project Zeus: delivery intelligence for an engineering org

One live view across every engineering board at Circo: what is being built, by whom, how healthy delivery is, where it is stuck and how fast the team ships.

Architect · Full-Stack Engineer

The problem

Sixteen engineers across frontend, backend, Android, iOS, QA, DevOps and design meant eleven different project boards, each telling part of the story. Answering a simple question, are we on track, meant opening all of them and doing the arithmetic by hand.

What I built

Project Zeus pulls every board into one read-only view and answers five questions continuously:

What is being worked on, across every team?
Who is working on what, and where is each person's focus?
How healthy is delivery: on track, slipping or blocked?
Where are the bottlenecks: what is ageing, overdue or stuck?
How fast are we shipping: velocity, cycle time and throughput, week over week, team against team?

How it works

Two tiers of boards. Engineering boards share one governed lifecycle, so their metrics compare like for like. Non-engineering boards keep their own workflows and are read on their own terms.
Live, not nightly. Changes stream in as they happen and appear in an activity feed, while snapshots preserve history for trend lines.
People, not just tickets. Per-contributor views show delivery, reviews and workload, so load can be balanced before anyone burns out.
A private channel for blockers. Anyone can raise a blocker that only they and the CTO see, which surfaces problems people would not post on a public board.
Signed-in and scoped. Access is limited to members of the organisation.

Why it matters

A CTO's job is to see the whole system. Zeus turned delivery from a weekly status meeting into something anyone could check in seconds, and made slipping work visible while there was still time to fix it.

System

Leading an AI-native engineering team

Building and leading a 16-person engineering team across backend, web, mobile, ML and data, with one shared operating model for coding agents.

LeadershipAgentsOperating model

System

The Circo platform

The creator-first video platform the media, intelligence and payments systems on this site belong to: native apps, web, studios and an event-driven backend.

PlatformArchitecture

System

One QA board across every team

A scheduled reconcile that pulls every issue awaiting QA from each team's board onto one central board, without ever overwriting a tester's verdict.

Engineering operationsQA

Project Zeus: delivery intelligence for an engineering org

The problem

What I built

How it works

Why it matters

Related systems

Leading an AI-native engineering team

The Circo platform

One QA board across every team

The problem

What I built

How it works

Why it matters