About CritBeat
Check-ins for teams, and a read on which one to open first.
Teams rarely go quiet all at once. A week slips, scope drifts, testing stops happening, and by the time it shows up in a review it has been true for a month. CritBeat is built to catch that earlier, without adding another standing meeting to anyone’s calendar.
A few questions, one check-in at a time
You add check-ins one at a time: a title, the day it’s due, and a short set of questions about what teams actually did. Every team answers the same questions for that check-in, and once a team has turned it in, its questions stay exactly as they were asked.
What a beat means
Each submission gets a beat from 1 to 5. A beat scores the completeness and quality of the work reported — not tone, not effort, not how the writing sounds. A team having a hard week and saying so plainly still scores on what they shipped.
Every beat comes with two or three sentences and a few factual tags: Scope drift, No testing since kickoff, Late · 2 days. The rule the reader follows is to name the move, not the mood. You will not see a team labelled “at risk” or “struggling” here, because neither tells you what to do next.
Across weeks, each team is marked as climbing, holding, or needing a listen — so a project lead opening the dashboard on Monday can see where to spend their attention before reading a single answer.
Your model, your key
The reading is done by a model you choose and pay for directly. Connect your own Claude or ChatGPT API key, pick the model you want, and change it whenever you like. Keys are encrypted before they are stored, and your check-ins are never used to train anything.
Who it’s for
CritBeat was built for people responsible for several teams at once — studio leads, design and engineering managers, anyone running a dozen project teams at once. If you have one team, you already know how they are doing. If you have eight, you probably find out last.
Get in touch
Questions, problems, or something you wish it did — write to [email protected].