The Shape of the App

The organizing idea

The sidebar is grouped by what kind of question you are answering, not by what kind of object you are touching. That is why tasks and projects sit at the top level while the reports about them sit under Insights, and why chat and email sit together under Inbox even though one is internal and the other is not.

The five groups are, in order: the top-level items (Dashboard, AI Agent, Projects, Clients, Calendar), then Inbox, Build, Insights, and Workspace. Alerts and Settings sit at the bottom, outside every group, because you visit them for different reasons.

Top level: the things you open every day

Dashboard is home. It carries a time tracker, productivity and completed-task cards, urgent work, and a right-hand rail with the morning briefing, agent alerts, notifications and recent activity. The rail is the part worth building a habit around — it is a two-minute read of everything that moved since you last looked.

AI Agent is the chat surface, and the most important page in the product. It is where you talk to Kavanah's agent and to any AI Employees you have created. Modules 7 and 8 are about it in depth.

Projects opens the task board — the board, list and calendar views of your work.

Clients is the CRM: companies, contacts, health, lifecycle stage, account owner, linked projects, and the entry point to the client portal. Its Deal Room tab is the sales pipeline.

Calendar is the unified calendar: task due dates plus events from every connected calendar provider.

Inbox, Build, Insights, Workspace

Inbox is everything that arrives. Messages is internal chat — DMs, group chats, channels, threads, reactions, pins. Email Inbox is real email from connected providers, with a switcher between Gmail, ProtonMail and Outlook. Requests is intake from outside the workspace: a public, tokenized form whose submissions you convert into tasks.

Build is where you make Kavanah do something new. Dev is the engineering hub — repos, pull requests, commits, deploys, incidents, the AI engineer, spec-to-tasks. Browser is a cloud browser you and the agent share. Apps is the marketplace of community-built extensions. Automations is no-code trigger-and-action rules. Whiteboards is a freeform canvas.

Insights is what the data says. Portfolio is the cross-project rollup — programs, objectives, budgets, forecasts, capacity, and a Resources tab with team availability. Planning is the timeline and roadmap view. Reports is the report library plus scheduled email delivery. Mind Maps is idea structuring.

Workspace is the connective tissue, and it is the longest group. In order: My Work is your personal queue. My Manager is Manager Mode. Triage is the review queue for AI-captured task candidates. Exec Meetings is the standing meeting between your AI executives. Water Cooler is the looser version of the same idea: you put a topic in front of your AI employees, they argue it from their own charters, close with a 'so what', and re-wake when you reply. Scheduled Runs is recurring autonomous agent work. All three sit high in the group rather than at the end, which surprises people who expect them buried. Then Time is tracking and productivity. Knowledge is five tabs of durable material: Library, Decisions, Retros, Onboarding and Glossary. Learn is this course catalogue. KVN is the workspace charter. People is the member directory. Comms is workspace-wide announcements.

The surfaces with no sidebar entry

Four things are easy to miss because nothing in the sidebar points at them.

The Hub opens from the Dashboard header (and from the command palette) and is a discovery surface for the rest of the product.

The Developer console is reached through Apps, on its Build tab. It is where you author and publish your own Kavanah app.

Issue Configuration — Jira-style issue types, resolutions, components, versions and project key prefixes — has no link at all and is reached by typing its URL. It is genuinely useful if you want task keys that look like ENG-114.

And Information, the in-app documentation reader, sits in the sidebar footer behind a question-mark button. It is the same content as the public docs site, readable without leaving the app.

Reading the dashboard rail

The right rail on the dashboard is the highest-value thirty seconds in the product, and the one most people collapse and forget. It carries four things: the morning briefing (what the agent thinks you should know), agent alerts (things the agent flagged, including approvals waiting on you), notifications (mentions, replies, project events), and recent activity (what your teammates did).

If you are going to build exactly one habit from this course, make it this: open the dashboard first, read the rail, then go where it tells you. Almost everything that has gone wrong in a Kavanah workspace was visible there first.