Recon vs Asking Your Engineer - The True Cost of "Hey, Can You Check Something?"
The Most Expensive Slack Message at Your Company
"Hey, can you check something real quick?"
Every PM has sent it. Every engineer has received it. And every time, both sides lose.
Here's what actually happens when a PM needs one piece of data:
- PM types the Slack message (2 minutes)
- Engineer sees it 30 minutes later, mid-flow on something else
- Engineer context-switches, opens the database client (5 minutes)
- Engineer writes and runs the query (5 minutes)
- Engineer screenshots the result, pastes it in Slack with minimal context (3 minutes)
- Engineer tries to get back into deep work (15-30 minutes to regain flow state)
- PM gets a number with no context and follows up with "wait, what does this mean?"
- Repeat.
Total cost: 45-60 minutes of combined time. For one question. Multiply by 5 times a day across a team.
At an average engineer salary, those interruptions cost $50,000-100,000 per year in lost productivity. Not in tools. In context-switching.
The Problem Isn't the PM. The Problem Is the System.
The PM isn't being lazy. They literally cannot access the information they need. The database requires SQL. The codebase requires GitHub access and technical knowledge. The ticket system requires knowing the right filters and query syntax.
So they do the only thing they can: ask someone who has access.
And the engineer isn't being slow. They're trying to protect their focus time while being helpful. But every "quick question" costs 20-30 minutes of real productivity.
Both sides are stuck.
What If the PM Could Just Look It Up?
That's what Recon does.
Recon connects to your database, codebase, Linear, and Notion. Your PM types a question in plain English. Recon investigates across your actual systems and returns an answer with cited sources.
No SQL knowledge needed. No GitHub access needed. No engineer interrupted.
The Slack way:
PM: "Hey, a bunch of customers are complaining that the export feature is broken. Can you check what's going on?"
Engineer (45 min later): "Yeah, exports are failing for accounts on the Team plan. Some timeout error"
PM: "How many customers are affected? And is there already a ticket for this?"
Engineer (30 min later): "Let me run a query... looks like 47 failed exports since Tuesday. There might be a ticket, let me check Linear"
PM: "Can you also find which file handles the export logic so I can add context to the ticket?"
Engineer: "Yeah give me a bit, I'm in the middle of something"
The Recon way:
PM: "Customers are reporting broken exports. How many are affected and is there a ticket for this?"
Recon (under a minute): "47 failed exports across 12 Team-plan accounts since Tuesday. There's an open Linear ticket LIN-847 'Export timeout on large datasets' filed Wednesday, assigned to Alex. The export logic in services/export-worker.ts shows CSV generation runs without pagination for large datasets - that's likely the bottleneck. Here are the queries and files I checked."
Same answer. Zero engineers interrupted. Full source transparency.
But I Could Just Build a Dashboard
Yes, and you should have dashboards for your most common metrics. But dashboards only answer the questions you anticipated.
The PM's actual questions are ad-hoc:
- "How does the assignment flow work in the codebase?"
- "Is there a Notion doc explaining this feature?"
- "What tickets are still open for this project and who's assigned?"
- "Can you cross-reference our usage data with the ticket status?"
You can't build a dashboard for every possible question. You need a tool that can investigate any question on the fly. That's Recon.
The Math
| Asking Your Engineer | Recon | |
|---|---|---|
| Time per question | 30-60 minutes total | 1-2 minutes |
| Questions per day | Limited by engineer availability | Unlimited |
| Context for PM | Screenshot with no explanation | Full answer with sources and queries shown |
| Impact on engineer | Lost flow state, frustration | Zero interruption |
| Monthly cost | $4,000-8,000 in lost engineering time | $19-99 |
Free Your Engineers. Empower Your Team.
Your engineers didn't spend years learning to code so they could copy-paste SQL results into Slack. Free them to build. Give your PMs the access they need.
Try Recon free. 50 queries, no credit card.