A control plane for product teams.
Helix is four layers stacked into one quiet system. Sources stream in. Core normalises. Intelligence ranks. Surfaces breathe. Nothing in the experience is more complicated than what it absolutely needs to be.
Sources
layer 1/4Six read-only adapters: Slack, Linear, GitHub, Figma, Notion, Calendar. No message storage. Cursor-based polling, never webhooks the user can't inspect.
Helix Core
layer 2/4Normalises every event into a canonical Signal{actor, surface, severity, ownership}. Persists 30 days rolling. The only layer that touches PII, encrypted at rest.
Intelligence
layer 3/4signal_score = recency × volatility × ownership × blast_radius. Rolling baselines per channel — a noisy team isn't the same as an alarming team.
Surfaces
layer 4/4Three quiet UIs: Pulse Map, Risk Lens, Async Digest. Each reads from the same ranked stream. Nothing is computed in the surface layer.
Pulse Map
Catch up on 48 hours in under five minutes.
A force-directed graph where every node is a team-owned surface — a channel, a repo, a board. Density grows with activity, color shifts with risk. You scan it the way you scan a sky.
Risk Lens
Triage what just changed, with sources attached.
A ranked list of the three things that genuinely moved since you last looked. Every item shows the upstream signal, the owner, and the suggested next move. P1 escalations always require a human ack.
Async Digest
Replace the morning standup. Permanently.
A two-minute brief composed from the signal model. Skim, ack, or expand any line into the source thread. Sent to the channel, the inbox, or just left in-app — the team chooses.
signal_score =
recency × volatility × ownership × blast_radiusHow long ago the signal fired. Decays exponentially over 24 hours.
Standard deviation of activity in this surface over the last 14 days. A spike on a quiet channel matters more.
How many teams the surface touches. Cross-team ownership weights heavier — more people to notify, more places to break.
Estimated downstream impact if this signal becomes a real incident. Pulled from the dependency graph.
Privacy
Read-only OAuth scopes. No message storage past 30 days. Workspace admins can revoke any source in one click.
Signal noise
Channel-level dampening kicks in when activity exceeds 3σ over baseline. Helix gets quieter the louder a team gets.
False positives
Any P1 escalation is held in a 90-second human-in-loop window. Acked → ships. Ignored → quietly downgraded.
Want the full architecture write-up?
The Notion case study covers the data model, the signal-noise math, and the rejected designs in full.