Module 1 — Getting Started · Lesson 1.4
Your Profile, Your Handle, and Your Skills
The page that decides when things fire, who can reach you, and what work you get offered
~11 min
What you'll learn
- Explain what each profile field is read by elsewhere in the product
- Set an @handle and understand what it lets other people do
- Declare skills and experience in a way the recommendation engine can use
- Recognize why a sparse profile produces worse assignments than no profile at all
Most products have a profile page that exists so your avatar is not a grey circle. Kavanah's is read by four different systems, and leaving it empty degrades all of them in ways that are hard to trace back to the cause. It is worth ten minutes once.
Timezone: the field that decides when things happen
Your timezone is the reference frame for every time in the product that concerns you. Scheduled reports resolve against it. Recurring agent runs resolve against it. When you tell the agent 'email them Monday at 9am', it is your zone that 9am means — and when it echoes a time back to you, it renders in your zone rather than the server's.
This is the single most consequential field on the page, and the failure mode when it is wrong is quiet: nothing errors, things just happen at the wrong hour. Set it to where you actually are, and update it if you move.
Your @handle: how people outside your workspace reach you
Kavanah gives you a unique @handle, editable in the Handle section of your profile (and from chat settings in Messages). It is what lets someone on Kavanah who is not in your workspace send you a message request.
This matters because the workspace boundary is otherwise absolute. Your handle is the deliberate hole in it: a contractor, a client, a colleague at another company can reach you by handle, by email, or by workspace slug through Messages → 'Message someone new', and you accept or ignore the request.
If you never set one, you are reachable by email address instead. Setting a handle mostly makes you easier to find and harder to typo.
Skills and experience: what you get offered
The Skills & Experience section is where you declare what you can do. There is a categorized vocabulary to pick from and room for your own custom skills, plus fields for a LinkedIn URL, an experience summary, and a resume — PDF or plain text, with the text extracted in your browser.
Kavanah derives skills from all of that and uses them to recommend you for matching work. Assignment recommendations, the routing that suggests who should own a task, the capability picture a manager sees when they are deciding — all of it reads this.
The important design decision here is that it is self-service. Your manager cannot fill it in for you, and the People directory is an admin surface, not a place where you edit yourself. That is deliberate: a skills profile someone else guessed at produces confidently wrong recommendations, which is worse than no recommendation, because a wrong one gets acted on.
So the practical advice is blunt: a half-filled profile is the worst state. Either declare your skills properly, or leave the section empty so the system knows it does not know.
What the agent knows about you
The AI agent reads your profile as part of knowing who it is talking to. Your name, your role, your timezone and your declared skills are part of the context it has when you ask it something.
That has an obvious upside — it will not suggest you take a task you have no skills for, and it will not schedule something at 3am — and one thing worth knowing: the profile is the honest place to put standing context about yourself, because it travels with you into every conversation. Personal context that belongs in a specific thread belongs in the thread. Standing facts about how you work belong here.
One trap for admins: the profile page's save writes the whole record. If you are editing profile fields through the API rather than the UI, send every field you want to keep — a partial write silently clears what you left out.
Fill it in properly
- 1
Thirty seconds. The timezone is the one that matters; the rest is so your teammates can tell who commented.
- 2
Pick something you would be happy giving to a client. It is how people outside your workspace start a conversation with you.
- 3
Declare skills and add your experience
Use the categorized vocabulary first, then add custom skills for anything it misses. Add the experience summary and resume if you want assignment recommendations that reflect what you have actually done.
- 4
Check how you appear in the directory
Open People and find yourself. That is the view a manager deciding who should own a task is looking at.
What to watch
- Skills coverage
- The share of workspace members with at least one declared skill on their profile.
- Healthy signal: Our suggested target is most of the team. Below about half, assignment recommendations are being computed from a sample that does not represent the team, and they will look arbitrary.
- Timezone correctness
- Whether each member's declared timezone matches where they actually work.
- Healthy signal: Everyone. This is the field behind almost every 'why did that email go out at 2am?' question.
Key takeaways
- ·Timezone drives every scheduled send and every time you give the agent — it is the highest-consequence field on the page.
- ·Your @handle is the deliberate hole in the workspace boundary: it lets people outside reach you with a message request.
- ·Skills are self-service by design; a manager guessing at them produces confidently wrong recommendations.
- ·A half-filled skills profile is worse than an empty one — empty tells the system it does not know.
- ·The agent reads your profile as standing context in every conversation.
Your account is set up. Next: getting everyone else in, and choosing what they can see when they arrive.