Quely Summer Product Roundup: Global Orbit, Global Lenses, and Expanded Documents

When you want to know the state of a project, you can’t find the answer in a single place. Your project management tool contains the work item, but the latest implementation state may be sitting in a GitHub pull request that’s probably not linked to the ticket. A scope change may be in an old Slack thread, and a decision you made that changed the delivery plan is in a meeting note. Your ticket doesn’t even reflect this change.

The information is there, but it is spread across Jira, GitHub, Slack, and other tools. There is no single place you can check to understand the current state of the work, so before you can say whether a delivery date is still realistic, explain what changed, or step in when a dependency is blocking progress, you have to piece the answer together from several sources.

Most times, the person who has to do this work is the engineering manager. In one r/EngineeringManagers discussion, an EM described becoming the team’s “human release notes”: the person everyone asks because they are the only one with a current view of what shipped, what changed, and why. Keeping that view current takes time, but it rarely appears in the team’s planned work. It simply becomes an invisible part of the engineering manager’s job.

Our biggest releases this summer focused on reducing the manual work required to understand what is happening across different projects. We built a way to find any information about different projects from one place, see decisions and follow-ups from different areas of work together, and create documents that remain connected to the conversations and work that produced them.

Global Orbit: get answers across projects from one place

In Quely, each project or piece of work can have its own Space, where the team discusses the work and keeps the related documents and other supporting information. Orbit, Quely’s AI assistant, reads that information and answers questions about the work. Until now, however, Orbit could only answer questions about the Space you were already in.

This meant that if an infrastructure project, a machine-learning release, and a design project were managed in different Spaces, you had to open each Space and ask Orbit separately for an update. For an engineering leader trying to understand release readiness, identify what is blocked, or see how a delay in one team affects another, the answers still had to be collected one project at a time.

Global Orbit changes that. You can now ask Orbit from Home, and it searches across the relevant Spaces to retrieve the information you need. You can ask what is blocking the infrastructure project, whether the machine-learning release is still on schedule, or how far the design work has progressed without going into each Space first.

The underlying information has not changed; how you access it has. You can start with the question, even if you do not know which Space contains the answer, and let Orbit find the relevant information across your team’s work.

Global Lenses: see decisions and follow-ups across projects

Important outcomes from engineering work often appear in a conversation before they are recorded anywhere else. A requirement changes during planning but the backlog is not updated, an action agreed during a customer call remains in the transcript, or a technical decision stays in a thread until someone proposes an approach the team has already considered and rejected.

Teams usually handle this by copying decisions into documents, turning follow-ups into tickets, and updating every affected work item. That process depends on someone noticing each outcome and recording it in the right place, which becomes harder as the number of projects, conversations, and decisions increases.

In Quely, Lenses reads the conversations within a Space and identifies decisions, action items, opportunities, and open questions. Previously, you could only see these within the Space where the conversation happened. If your team was working across several Spaces, you had to check each one separately to find out what had been decided, what remained unresolved, and what required follow-up.

Global Lenses brings those items together across your team’s Spaces. From one place, you can see an unanswered question from an infrastructure discussion, an action item from a customer call, or a decision made during planning, along with the conversation it came from.

You can then schedule a meeting around an unresolved question or push an action item into the project-management tool where the team will track it. Lenses makes these outcomes easier to find and act on; your team still decides which ones require action, escalation, or no further response.

Documents: turn discussions into documents without losing the reasoning

Technical work often starts in a conversation and ends in a document. During that conversation, the team clarifies requirements, identifies constraints, considers alternatives, and makes trade-offs. The finished proposal or technical plan usually records the chosen approach, but not always the discussion that explains how the team arrived there.

That becomes a problem when someone returns to the document months later. They can see what the team decided, but the assumptions behind the decision may still be in a Slack thread, a meeting transcript, or the memory of the people who were involved. If those assumptions change, it becomes difficult to tell whether the original decision still holds.

Quely already provided a lightweight document inside each Space, giving teams somewhere to expand on an idea without moving it away from the related work and conversation. We have now expanded Documents so that you can create multiple documents in a Space and ask Orbit to turn a conversation into a structured first draft. Your team can then develop the document together with Orbit while keeping the relevant discussion available in the same Space.

If the document already exists in Notion, Confluence, or Google Docs, you can import it into Quely, work on it with your team and Orbit, and push the updated version back when you are finished. The document can remain in the tool your team already uses while the work, discussion, and reasoning around it remain available in Quely.

Reducing the manual work between tools

None of these features requires your team to replace Jira, GitHub, Notion, Confluence, or Google Docs. Those tools can remain the systems of record for the work they manage. Quely addresses the manual work between them: collecting updates from different projects, finding decisions and follow-ups inside conversations, and keeping a document connected to the reasoning that shaped it.

Global Orbit gives you one place to ask questions across Spaces. Global Lenses brings together the decisions, action items, opportunities, and open questions emerging from different areas of work. Documents let your team develop structured content without moving it away from the related work and discussion.

For engineering leaders, the value is not having more information. It is spending less time assembling information from different places before you can understand what has changed, decide where to intervene, or give others an accurate update.

These three releases are designed to reduce that work.

See how they work: Try the interactive demos above.