The reasoning behind our decisions lived in my head and two other people's heads. I finally did something about it.
A thing I built because I got tired of maintaining a slide deck:
I'm a Senior PM, and for the past year I've been running a recurring meeting with several leaders where the same questions kept coming up week after week.
How was this built? Why did we do it this way? Can we change the approach?
We had meeting notes. We had Confluence pages. But none of them captured what actually mattered. Who made the decision, why, and what we considered and rejected. So I started keeping a slide. A manual, hand-updated slide with the major decisions on it, just so I could point to something in the meeting.
It worked. It was also completely unsustainable. I was rebuilding structured information from unstructured notes by hand, every week, for a problem that should have been solved automatically.
The second thing that pushed me over the edge was someone asking why a feature was built a certain way. Specifically, why certain things were left out of the first version. We had a Confluence page with the feature overview. It had everything except the one thing they needed: the reasoning. Why we made the calls we made. What we considered and chose not to do. That context had never been written down anywhere. It lived in my head and the heads of two other people who were in the room.
So I built Cairn.
You flag a Slack thread, meeting notes, or an email chain and Cairn pulls out the decision, the reasoning, who made it, and what was considered and rejected. You review it, edit anything that's off, and save it. It takes under two minutes. The card gets a shareable link you can drop into Confluence, send to a new engineer, or open in a meeting when someone contradicts something they already agreed to.
It's in beta now. The first 50 signups get 2 months free and most people are getting access within two weeks.
If you've ever been the only person on your team who remembered why things work the way they do, I'd love for you to try it.