Daily emoji based mood logs per team member. Aggregate mood analytics across the organisation with 30 day trend visualisation giving managers an early signal of team burnout before it hits velocity.
TARO makes mood logging frictionless one tap per day and aggregates the signal into analytics that give managers visibility into team wellbeing before it becomes a sprint problem.
Log
Every team member sees a mood check in prompt each morning, a gentle nudge displayed on the TARO dashboard, not an interruptive popup. Five options map to five mood levels: Great, Good, Okay, Low, and Rough. One tap logs the mood for the day. An optional free text note field lets members add context if they want to, entirely their choice. The prompt disappears once logged and does not resurface until the next day.
Trend
Each team member's personal mood view shows a 30 day rolling line chart of their own logged moods. The chart makes gradual drift visible a team member who has been logging Okay or Low for two weeks may not have noticed the pattern day by day, but the chart makes it undeniable. The personal trend is visible only to the individual and, with explicit opt in, to their direct manager. No one else in the workspace has access to individual mood histories.
Analyse
Managers and org admins see an aggregated, anonymised view of team mood the distribution of Great / Good / Okay / Low / Rough entries across the organisation for any time window, and a 30 day trend line for the average team mood score. Burnout signals fire automatically when the aggregate mood drops below a configurable threshold for a sustained period typically three or more consecutive days with an average below Okay. The signal appears in the Risk Alerts Dashboard so leads can act early, not retrospectively.
Privacy
Mood tracking only works if team members trust that logging a bad day won't be used against them. TARO's privacy architecture enforces this structurally not through a policy statement but through what the system actually allows. Managers and admins have access to anonymised aggregate data only. Individual mood histories are accessible solely by the person who logged them. No manager, regardless of permission level, can see which specific team member logged which specific mood on any given day.
Velocity drops are lagging indicators. Mood trends are leading ones. By the time burnout hits the sprint, it has been visible in the daily check in data for weeks.
When a team's average mood drops below Okay for a week, the velocity drop that follows is predictable not a surprise. TARO surfaces the mood signal 10 to 14 days before it shows up in the burndown chart, giving leads time to intervene before delivery is affected.
A five minute check in survey nobody completes generates no data. A single emoji tap takes two seconds, appears in one place, and disappears when done. The lower the friction, the higher the participation rate and high participation is what makes the aggregate signal reliable.
When aggregate mood drops below the burnout threshold for three consecutive days, TARO fires a Monitor severity alert in the Risk Alerts Dashboard the same panel leads check for blocked tasks and velocity drops. Wellbeing risk is treated with the same urgency as delivery risk.
Burnout rarely announces itself. It accumulates gradually a week of Okay, then a week of Low, then a week of Rough. Day by day each entry seems fine. The 30 day chart makes the slope visible at a glance, for the individual themselves and in aggregate for the manager.
The note field is genuinely optional logging an emoji with no note is the default and encouraged path. Notes are there for team members who want to add context for themselves, not as a field managers expect to be filled. The distinction between opt in context and mandatory reporting is what keeps logging voluntary.
When a team's average mood drops below Okay for a week, the velocity drop that follows is predictable not a surprise. TARO surfaces the mood signal 10 to 14 days before it shows up in the burndown chart, giving leads time to intervene before delivery is affected.
A five minute check in survey nobody completes generates no data. A single emoji tap takes two seconds, appears in one place, and disappears when done. The lower the friction, the higher the participation rate and high participation is what makes the aggregate signal reliable.
Team members log honestly when they trust the data won't be used against them. The anonymisation is structural managers literally cannot access individual entries regardless of their permission level. No policy can create that trust. The architecture can.
When aggregate mood drops below the burnout threshold for three consecutive days, TARO fires a Monitor severity alert in the Risk Alerts Dashboard the same panel leads check for blocked tasks and velocity drops. Wellbeing risk is treated with the same urgency as delivery risk.
Burnout rarely announces itself. It accumulates gradually a week of Okay, then a week of Low, then a week of Rough. Day by day each entry seems fine. The 30 day chart makes the slope visible at a glance, for the individual themselves and in aggregate for the manager.
The note field is genuinely optional logging an emoji with no note is the default and encouraged path. Notes are there for team members who want to add context for themselves, not as a field managers expect to be filled. The distinction between opt in context and mandatory reporting is what keeps logging voluntary.
Enable mood tracking in one click. The first signal appears the same day.
Engineering leads running multi month delivery programmes and HR leads managing distributed teams both need the same thing: an early signal that something is wrong with team wellbeing before it shows up as attrition or a missed sprint.
800+ product teams
already using TARO
Mood levels tracked
Day trend window
Individual entries managers can see
Days earlier than velocity
Engineering leads use the 30 day mood trend alongside the sprint burndown. When the burndown is on track but the mood average is declining, the lead knows the sprint is being delivered at a cost that won't be sustainable next sprint. The intervention descoping work, redistributing load, cancelling a meeting series happens on day 5, not at the retrospective. The retrospective becomes confirmation, not discovery.
Mood trends become most meaningful when read alongside sprint velocity, workload distribution, and risk alerts the full picture of whether the team is sustainable, not just whether the sprint is on track.
Burnout signals from mood tracking feed directly into the Risk Alerts Dashboard as Monitor severity alerts treated with the same visibility as blocked tasks and velocity drops.
When mood declines correlate with one team member's workload being consistently above capacity, Workload Distribution surfaces the reassignment suggestions that relieve the pressure directly.
Sprint planning that uses velocity data and mood trend data together makes sustainable commitment decisions not just technically achievable ones that quietly erode team health over successive sprints.
The Team Mood dashboard widget shows the live distribution and 7 day aggregate trend in one panel giving leads and org admins a persistent wellbeing view alongside their delivery metrics.
Burnout signals from mood tracking feed directly into the Risk Alerts Dashboard as Monitor severity alerts treated with the same visibility as blocked tasks and velocity drops.
When mood declines correlate with one team member's workload being consistently above capacity, Workload Distribution surfaces the reassignment suggestions that relieve the pressure directly.
Sprint planning that uses velocity data and mood trend data together makes sustainable commitment decisions not just technically achievable ones that quietly erode team health over successive sprints.
The Team Mood dashboard widget shows the live distribution and 7 day aggregate trend in one panel giving leads and org admins a persistent wellbeing view alongside their delivery metrics.
Common questions from engineering leads, HR teams, and team members evaluating TARO's mood tracking.
Missing entries are excluded from calculations rather than counted as a default value. If a team member doesn't log on a given day, that day simply doesn't contribute to their personal trend or the team aggregate it is treated as absent data, not as a neutral Okay. This means aggregate calculations reflect only the members who actively participated on any given day. The participation rate itself is a visible metric in the mood analytics panel a team where only 40% of members are logging is a team where the signal is weaker and less reliable. Org admins can see participation rates by team but cannot see which specific individuals did or didn't log on a given day.
One tap daily. 30 days of signal. The intervention that happens before it's too late.