How Pengwiz works

Getting started

Five minutes from signup to your first bet.

1. Create an account. Sign up with email or a social login. No credit card.
2. Create an organization. Everything — bets, cycles, wiki, products — belongs to an org. Give it a name and a URL slug.
3. Invite your team. In Settings, generate an invite link and send it. Anyone with the link joins your org.
4. Open a cycle. A cycle is the fixed period your bets live in. Pick a length between two and six weeks.
5. Place your first bet. Go to Bets, describe the problem, and set a target outcome and an appetite. You cannot save a bet without a measurable outcome — that is the point.

Every screen in the app has an info button in the corner with the same definitions you will find here.

The BEACON framework

Six stages in one continuous loop. Most tools stop at “shipped”. BEACON closes the loop by grading whether the outcome actually happened, and feeds that back into the next round of shaping.

Bets

A bet is the atomic unit of work in BEACON. It replaces tickets, epics and backlogs. Each bet is a commitment to pursue a specific outcome within a fixed time budget called an appetite. Scope flexes to fit the appetite; the appetite never stretches to fit the scope.

Impact bet

Targets a user or business outcome metric directly.

Enabling bet

Targets a capability or leading indicator that serves a downstream outcome.

Guardrail bet

Meets an obligation or retires a risk. Success is binary.

Appetite

How much time an outcome is worth — fixed. Scope flexes to fit, time never stretches.

Pitched

Shaped and proposed, but not yet placed into a cycle.

Active

Placed in a cycle and work is in progress.

Shipped

Done and deployed. Awaiting outcome grading.

Killed

Stopped mid-cycle based on pre-committed kill criteria.

Lane

Bet (planned work), Reactive (incidents and urgent work), or Long-shot (ambitious, failure-safe).

You cannot save a bet without a measurable outcome. That is what makes this different from ticket shuffling — clarity up front.

Tasks

A bet breaks down into tasks — the concrete pieces someone actually picks up. Tasks are what agents work too, so the same board serves both.

Status

To do, in progress, done, tested. Marking a task done notifies whoever asked for it.

Assignee & tester

Two seats per task: who builds it, and who confirms it. Either can be a person or their agent.

History

Every transition is recorded with who moved it — and whether it was the person or their agent — so a mid-task handoff stays legible.

Brief

One call (CLI: pengwiz brief) bundles the task with the bet's problem, outcome, out-of-scope list, kill criteria and remaining appetite.

A task title tells an agent nothing. The brief is what makes a task workable without a conversation — for people too.

The Path

The Path replaces abstract progress bars with a journey anyone can understand. Each bet moves through clear stages, from an idea that has been shaped all the way to live in production. Customers can see this too.

Shaped

The bet has a clear problem, approach and appetite. Ready for someone to start.

Started

Work has begun. Getting oriented — reading code, exploring the problem space.

Solving

The deep work phase. Unknowns are resolved, designs are made, risk is removed.

Clear path

The turning point. All major questions are answered; from here the work is predictable.

Shipping

Implementation, polish and deployment. Steady progress toward done.

Live

In production and usable. The outcome can now be measured against the target.

Pace

Derived from signal frequency: On Track (daily), Slowing (2 days), At Risk (3+ days), Silent (5+ days).

A bet stuck at Solving needs a scope cut or a decision. A bet racing through Shipping means execution is clean.

Cycles & cooldown

A cycle is a fixed-length working period. It governs planning and learning, not releases — ship continuously underneath it. Cooldown is a protected recovery period after each cycle.

Cycle

A fixed-length working period (2–6 weeks). A planning-and-learning rhythm, not a release batch.

Cooldown

A protected period after each cycle (~20–25% of its length) for debt, learning and shaping. No feature bets allowed.

Planning

Bets are shaped, pitched and placed into the upcoming cycle.

Active

The working phase. Bets are in progress and signals are posted.

Cooldown items

Debt, polish and learning work is tracked as lightweight cooldown items — visible work, without the ceremony of a bet.

Adaptive cadence

Cycle length fits the work type. Hold it steady for about three cycles so forecasts stay meaningful.

Cooldown is sacred. Whether it actually happened shows up on the cycle report, so skipping it is a visible choice instead of a quiet habit.

Signals

Signals are the async pulse of your team. Instead of a standup, each person posts a quick signal on their active bets. The bet owner is notified the moment something needs a human — blocked, need a decision, risk spotted — and every signal stays on the record.

Moving

Progress is happening. Optionally advance the bet on the Path and note what changed.

Blocked

Work cannot continue. Name who or what is blocking; the bet owner is notified.

Need decision

A fork in the road. Someone with authority needs to choose. Triggers a focused sync.

Scope cut

Something was intentionally dropped to protect the appetite. Records what and why.

Risk spotted

New uncertainty discovered. May need the bet to move backward on the Path.

Demo ready

Something is showable to stakeholders or customers. Good for async feedback.

Confidence

Your gut feeling — confident, neutral or worried. Builds a sentiment trend over time.

Post one signal a day. Two taps: type plus confidence. Add a note if something interesting happened. That is the whole ritual.

Live board

Everything in Pengwiz updates in real time, for everyone in the org. Drag a card, and it moves on your teammate's screen a couple of seconds later. An agent finishes a task from a terminal, and the board reflects it before anyone thinks to refresh.

• No setup. There is nothing to enable. Boards, bet pages, tasks and comment threads all stay current while they are open.
• Paced to activity. A busy org refreshes about every two seconds; a quiet one winds down, and a tab in the background costs nothing.
• Made for agents. Live updates are what make agent teammates watchable: the whole org sees a card move the moment the agent moves it, badged as agent work.

The Learn loop

Every shipped bet gets graded: did it hit the outcome? This closes the causal loop from shaping to betting to building to shipping to learning. Without grading, you are just shipping features and hoping.

Proven

Hard data confirms the bet hit its target outcome. The gold standard.

Supported

Evidence suggests it worked but isn't conclusive. Directional success.

Judged

No hard metrics available — team judgment says it worked.

Failed

Outcome was missed. Not a punishment — it's data.

Hit rate

Percentage of graded bets that were Proven or Supported. A healthy team sits at 60–80%.

Grade within two weeks of shipping, while the evidence is still fresh. A high hit rate means your shaping is strong.

Strategies & public pages

A strategy groups bets under one goal and gives you a shareable public page. Anyone with the link sees live progress — no account, no license, no status meeting. The same page accepts incoming work requests.

• Public progress. Each strategy gets a link at /s/your-slug showing bets and where they sit on the Path.
• Request inbox.Requests submitted from that page land in the strategy inbox. Accept one to shape it into a bet, or decline it to protect your team’s appetite.
• Pre-filled shaping. Accepting a request opens the bet editor pre-filled, so you still set outcome, appetite and guardrails before committing.

Wiki

Documentation lives next to the work it describes, per strategy. Pages can be published publicly alongside the strategy page.

• Stale detection. Pages that have not been touched in a while are flagged, so nobody trusts a doc that quietly rotted.
• Verification. A team member can mark a page as verified, which resets its freshness.
• Public sharing. Published pages are readable without an account.

Support desk

Every product you create gets a public support page at /p/your-slug. Customers file a ticket there without creating an account.

• Customers attach files to a ticket and follow the thread by a private link.
• Your team replies from inside the app; the customer is notified.
• A ticket that turns out to be real work can become a bet directly.

Meeting scheduling

Publish your weekly availability and let people outside the team book a slot at /u/your-username — no account needed on their side.

• Set your weekly hours, slot length and timezone under Scheduling in settings.
• Bookings show up in your upcoming list; guests get a link to cancel.
• Double bookings are rejected by a database constraint, not a background job, so two people clicking the same slot at the same moment cannot both win.

AI assists

Small assists at the moments where a blank field stalls people. Each one drafts; you decide. Nothing is written on your behalf without review.

• Shaping review. Before a bet is saved, get warnings about vague outcomes and suggested rewrites for the problem, outcome and guardrail fields.
• Task breakdown. Suggested tasks for a shaped bet, ready to prune.
• Cycle plan draft. A starting plan for the betting table from your pitched bets.
• Standup narrative.Yesterday's activity as a short readable digest — the standup, without the meeting.
• Drafts where you write the most. Wiki pages from bullets, support ticket replies in context, cooldown item suggestions, and a cycle report narrative.
• Docs assistant. A question-answering assistant on your public strategy docs. You choose the audience — off, org members only, or any reader. A Pro feature.

AI agents

Agents are first-class teammates in Pengwiz. An API key acts as its user — scoped to one organization, revocable at any time — and everything an agent writes is marked agent-authored, so the signals feed and task history always show whether a person or their agent did the work. API access — the CLI, MCP and agents — is part of the Pro plan.

• CLI. Any terminal agent can drive the full product through pengwiz with --json. Run pengwiz agent-guidefor instructions to paste into your agent's CLAUDE.md — the work loop, real signal types, and the rules that matter.
• Claude Code plugin. One install and agents stop waiting to be told: a session-start check surfaces the tasks assigned to the account, a skill teaches the loop — brief, start, work, log time, done — and /pengwiz:work drains the backlog. The plugin is in beta; get in touchand we'll set you up.
• MCP endpoint. Agents that speak MCP can read bets, create work and pull the same org context the CLI serves.

Agents follow the same discipline people do: appetite is fixed, out-of-scope is respected, and an agent that hits a wall raises blocked or need_decision instead of pushing on — those signals still notify a human. Routine progress notes stay out of your inbox.

CLI

The pengwizCLI puts the whole product in your terminal — and in your terminal agent's. Install it with one command:

curl -fsSL https://products.pengwiz.com/cli/install.sh | sh

Create an API key in Settings (a Pro feature, like all API access), run pengwiz auth login, and everything is a command away: bets (pitch, edit, place), table (the betting table), signals, tasks, time and timesheet, cycles, strategies and wiki, inbox, and context — the same agent-orientation aggregate the MCP endpoint serves. Every command takes --json for raw API output, which is what makes it drivable by Claude Code, Cursor, or any other terminal agent.

Plans & billing

Free covers up to five team members and five wiki pages, with unlimited bets, the Path, signals and public progress pages. Pro removes those limits and adds API access — the CLI, MCP and agent teammates — at $12 per user per month.

Pro starts with a 14-day trial. Seats are counted per active member — add someone mid-month and the charge is prorated. If you cancel, the org returns to Free at the end of the paid period. Nothing is deleted, but you cannot add past the Free limits again until you are back under them.

See the pricing section for the full comparison.