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I got tired of spending an hour every morning rebuilding the same Jira report — so I built this.

 Every single day, no matter what was going on, that report had to go out.

Hypercare? It still had to go out. Deployment day with a hundred things on fire? Still had to go out. Slammed with back-to-back meetings, or sitting in an airport with a laptop on my knees while travelling? It still had to go out.


Because that daily report isn't optional. It's how the team stays aligned, how stakeholders stay informed, and — let's be honest — how you keep a small issue from turning into an escalation. Skip a day and the questions start. Miss a signal and you're explaining it after the fact.


So I was spending 45–60 minutes every morning doing the same thing: running the same JQL queries, tallying the same KPIs, checking who's on leave, noting on-call, formatting it into something readable, and pasting it into email. Rinse and repeat. On my best days it was tedious. On my worst days it was the last thing I had capacity for — and those were exactly the days it mattered most.

So I built Manager's Companion.

It's a Chrome extension that does all of that for you:

  • 📊 One-click daily report — availability, roster, on-call, notes, and Jira metrics assembled automatically
  • 🎯 Honest signals — cycle time, stalled work, bus factor, backlog hygiene… the things ticket counts quietly hide
  • 🚨 Incident monitor — desktop alerts when something new breaches SLA, so nothing slips
  • 🏖️ Real availability — leaves and holidays factored in, so you know who's actually free today
  • 🖼️ Share in seconds — copy a crisp image or PDF straight into Outlook and send

And it runs fully client-side — no server, no telemetry, your Jira token never leaves your browser.

The result: what used to be an hour is now about 5 minutes. Even on the deployment days. Even from the airport lounge. The communication still goes out, on time, every time — and the escalations stay away.


If you're a lead sending a daily report and living the same grind, give it a try. 👇

[install link / setup guide]


A couple of options depending on where you're posting:

  • Slack/Teams — this works as-is; maybe trim the middle paragraph if your channel favors short posts.
  • Confluence — I can format this as a proper page with the setup guide attached (you've got Confluence connected).
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/managers-companion/noielgdhlkohbbgghaolikioghpecfag?authuser=0&hl=en

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