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A Kavanah Course — Free, Six Modules
Twenty-four lessons on the discipline of management, grounded in the surfaces you actually use every day.
A practical course for managers, founders, and tech leads running real teams. It teaches the four primitives of management — direct, allocate, feedback, consequence — and the KVN methodology that Kavanah is built around. Every lesson ends with a concrete action you take inside the product and a metric you watch to see whether the action is working.
An Introduction
Why this course exists, what it teaches, and how to use it alongside the product.
Project management changed when AI started shipping the work. The bottleneck moved from throughput — how much the team can produce — to alignment — whether what the team produces is the right thing, in the right order, at the right quality. This course teaches the discipline as it has always been practiced and as it has to be practiced now: explicitly, with intention, against a system that can absorb most of the rote work but cannot decide what to point at.
Managers running real teams. Founders who are doing some of the management themselves. Tech leads, project leads, agency principals, consultancy owners — anyone whose job is to take an outcome and a group of people and produce a coordinated result. The course assumes no prior management experience and no prior Kavanah experience. It does assume you are interested in why each technique exists, not just how to click it. If you skip the why, the techniques decay into rituals — and rituals stop working the moment the team you learned them on changes.
Six modules. Twenty-four lessons. Each lesson is short — ten to fifteen minutes of reading — and ends with two practical artifacts. The first is a Kavanah-in-practice section: three to four steps you take inside the product to actually do the thing the lesson taught. The second is a metrics block: the numbers you watch to know whether the thing is working. If you do nothing else with the course, do the steps and watch the metrics.
Module 1 — Foundations. What management actually is, why it changed, the KVN methodology, the four primitives, and how to set up a workspace deliberately.
Module 2 — Conversation to commitment. Why most teams lose work between meetings and tracking. How Kavanah turns conversations into proposed tasks. How to triage proposals into real work.
Module 3 — Right person, right work. Why assignment is the highest-leverage decision. Capability, availability, and the choice between humans and AI Employees.
Module 4 — Estimation and time. Why estimates are reliably wrong, what they are actually for, and how automated estimation in Kavanah produces a distribution you can plan against.
Module 5 — Operating cadence with KVN. Workspace, project, and task KVN. The under-discussed false-friends field. Negation enforcement as a measurable discipline.
Module 6 — Metrics. A three-layer framework — input, throughput, outcome — and four to six concrete metrics per layer with healthy ranges and action triggers.
Read in order. The modules build on each other; metrics in Module 6 are defined throughout earlier lessons, and the operating cadence in Module 5 assumes the conversation-to-task pipeline from Module 2 is running. The whole course is roughly four hours of reading. A reasonable cadence is one module per week, with the team's actual setup happening between lessons.
The in-app version of this course lives at /learn inside your workspace. Each lesson's Kavanah-in-practice steps link directly to the relevant surface, so you can read and do at the same time. The public version at kavanah.ai/course is the same content; if you are still evaluating Kavanah, read the public version first and create a workspace once you reach Module 1.4.
The discipline of management is older than any tool, and the next decade will not retire it; it will raise the premium on it. Kavanah is built around the premise that the discipline can be made cheap enough to do every day. This course is the playbook for doing exactly that.
Module 1
What management is now, and how to set up the workspace it runs in
4 lessons · ~50 min
The four primitives, the KVN methodology, and the minimum viable setup that earns the rest of the course its leverage.
Lesson 1.1 · 12 min
What Management Actually Is, Now
Why the job changed when AI started shipping the work
Start lesson
Lesson 1.2 · 14 min
The KVN Methodology
Know-How, Vision, Negation — the three axes every delegation must carry
Start lesson
Lesson 1.3 · 11 min
The Four Primitives
Direct, allocate, feedback, consequence — and what each looks like in Kavanah
Start lesson
Lesson 1.4 · 13 min
Setting Up a Kavanah Workspace with Intention
The first ten minutes — and what to do in them
Start lesson
Module 2
Tracking every conversation, generating tasks automatically, triaging at speed
4 lessons · ~49 min
Where work is lost and how Kavanah closes the gap. Chat, AI agent, email, requests, calendar — composed into one work-graph the manager triages, not types into.
Lesson 2.1 · 11 min
The Capture Problem
Why most of the work that should happen never makes it onto a board
Start lesson
Lesson 2.2 · 13 min
Conversations as the Work-Graph Input
What Kavanah reads, what it does not, and how it composes a single view of intent
Start lesson
Lesson 2.3 · 15 min
Auto-Generating Tasks from Conversation
What a good candidate looks like, what the agent fills in, what the human still has to decide
Start lesson
Lesson 2.4 · 10 min
Triage — Work vs. Noise
The thirty-second decision that protects the rest of the team
Start lesson
Module 3
Capability, availability, and the choice between humans and AI Employees
4 lessons · ~49 min
Why assignment is the highest-leverage decision a manager makes — and how Kavanah's skills, availability, and persona systems compose into a real recommendation.
Lesson 3.1 · 11 min
Assignment Is the Highest-Leverage Decision a Manager Makes
Why who-does-what beats every other lever, and why most teams get it wrong
Start lesson
Lesson 3.2 · 13 min
Capability — Declared, Learned, and Reinforced
How Kavanah models who is good at what, and why the model gets smarter over time
Start lesson
Lesson 3.3 · 11 min
Availability and Capacity
Who can take this on, this week, without breaking something already in flight
Start lesson
Lesson 3.4 · 14 min
AI Employees as Assignees
When the right doer is a persona, and how to design one that earns its place on the team
Start lesson
Module 4
Automated time estimation, the estimate-vs-actual loop, and capacity planning
4 lessons · ~46 min
Estimates as distributions, not numbers. The four signals Kavanah uses, the feedback loop that keeps them calibrated, and how to plan a sprint, a quarter, and a year against them.
Lesson 4.1 · 10 min
Why Estimates Are Wrong (and Why That's Not the Point)
The political life of a number, and what it is actually for
Start lesson
Lesson 4.2 · 13 min
Automated Time Estimation in Kavanah
How the model produces an estimate, what signals it uses, and how to make it sharper
Start lesson
Lesson 4.3 · 11 min
Estimate vs. Actual — Closing the Feedback Loop
How to make the gap visible without making it punitive
Start lesson
Lesson 4.4 · 12 min
Capacity Planning at Workspace Scale
Sprint, quarter, year — and the difference between commitment and intent
Start lesson
Module 5
Workspace, project, and task charters — and measuring whether the Negations work
4 lessons · ~41 min
The three scopes of KVN, the under-used false-friends field, and the negation-hits metric that tells you whether the boundaries are doing real work.
Lesson 5.1 · 11 min
The Workspace KVN Charter
The standing K, V, and N that every project and every conversation inherits
Start lesson
Lesson 5.2 · 11 min
Project KVN and False Friends
Per-project charters, and the trap of nearby work that looks like the real work
Start lesson
Lesson 5.3 · 9 min
Task KVN — When to Demand All Three Axes
And when to let the charter inheritance carry the weight
Start lesson
Lesson 5.4 · 10 min
Negation Enforcement
Measuring the value of the things you said no to
Start lesson
Module 6
Input, throughput, outcome — and the dashboard that is worth reading
4 lessons · ~46 min
A three-layer framework and a concrete dashboard: people metrics, work metrics, and operating metrics, each with healthy ranges and the action a change should produce.
Lesson 6.1 · 11 min
A Framework for Measuring Management Quality
What is worth measuring, what is worth ignoring, and how to tell which is which
Start lesson
Lesson 6.2 · 12 min
People Metrics
Capability fit, throughput, growth, and load — without making it a performance hammer
Start lesson
Lesson 6.3 · 11 min
Work Metrics
Cycle time, estimate accuracy, KVN completeness, rework — the throughput layer
Start lesson
Lesson 6.4 · 12 min
Operating Metrics
Capture latency, negation reuse, AI Employee contribution, customer outcomes
Start lesson