Why Engineering Managers Spend Too Much Time Chasing Updates (and How AI Can Help)
Every Engineering Manager knows the feeling: you start your day planning to tackle a strategic project, only to find yourself immediately submerged in a tide of manual status checks. You’re not managing engineers; you’re managing overhead.
The reality for many EMs is that a significant chunk of their valuable time—time that should be spent on mentorship, career development, and technical strategy—is instead consumed by a single, relentless task: chasing updates.
The result? Managers are fatigued, developers are interrupted, and strategic initiatives languish.
The Vicious Cycle of Update Chasing
The need to know “what’s the status?” is fundamental to project success, yet the methods we use to get that answer are often the least efficient. Why do EMs feel compelled to chase updates continually?
- Distributed Teams & Asynchronicity: As teams become more geographically dispersed, the spontaneous hallway update disappears. EMs must manually bridge the visibility gap.
- The Flaw of Standups: While essential for communication, manual standups are often a report-out session rather than a problem-solving session. They are time-boxed, prone to bias, and still require the EM to synthesize the information later.
- Lack of Real-Time Visibility: Traditional project management tools can fall out of sync with actual development work the moment a task is moved. This forces EMs to constantly ping developers, Slack channels, or check repositories manually to find the “single source of truth.”
The Solution: Automated Standup
The solution isn’t to ask for fewer updates; it’s to make those updates invisible and automated. This is where AI-powered project management platforms, like the principles underpinning MattPM, are fundamentally shifting the role of the engineering manager.
Instead of interrupting a developer to ask about their progress, the system intelligently extracts the progress directly from where the work happens: the codebase and development tools.
Here’s how AI cuts out the need for update chasing:
1. Automated Standup Generation
AI tools analyze activity patterns—specifically **commit messages, and pull request (PR) data from platforms like GitHub along with activities from project management platforms like Jira. They then use this data to automatically generate a daily or weekly standup report.
Result: The daily standup becomes a summary generated by the AI using data from Git and Jira, freeing up the team’s time to discuss blockers and solutions, not just to read off a to-do list.
2. Proactive Blocker and Follow-Up Identification
Manual follow-ups are a huge time sink. An EM often has to scan dozens of threads or tickets to identify who is stuck and what needs intervention.
How AI helps with this: AI systems monitor for signs of stagnation (e.g., a long-open PR with no reviews, or a drop in activity on a key issue). They generate automated, intelligent follow-ups on behalf of the EM, prompting the right person to take action before the EM has to intervene manually.
3. Real-Time Performance Review
Instead of relying on anecdotal evidence or self-reported data, EMs gain comprehensive, objective analytics derived directly from Git activity. This allows managers to proactively spot a team members that are underperforming or a key developer is overloaded—without having to pull a single report or spreadsheet.
How MattPM Helps Save Engineering Managers Time
MattPM addresses update-chasing by serving as an Automated Project Management tool that integrates with Git to track commits, issues, and pull requests. It generates daily standup summaries through analysis of commit messages and activity patterns, offering engineering managers real-time visibility into performance without disruptive and time-consuming manual data collection.
Experience MattPM today: https://mattpm.ai