I just closed my laptop after our morning standup, and for a split second, I didn’t see my desk. I saw a specific, crooked pine tree outside a small cabin in rural New England.

I’m not usually the “vacation” type. My brain tends to effectively keep me engaged at all times of day, and I usually prefer the speed of the city or the pace of a high-growth sprint. But when the work gets as intense as it’s been lately as we rebuild the core of the Piere experience from the ground up, I find myself dreaming of that cabin.

It’s a place where you do less and hear less. And because there’s so much less noise, you start to pay attention to everything you usually miss.

The realization I always have when I’m out there is almost a paradox: The most important things in my life actually take care of themselves while I’m just going about my life. The seasons shift, the forest thrives, and the world keeps turning without me having to click ‘Save’ or check a single status bar.

That “self-driving” nature of the woods is exactly what’s been on my mind as we rebuild the front end (well, all ends, actually) of Piere.

We’ve been working around the clock to move Piere past being just a tool you have to manage. In our standup yesterday, we talked about what it means to truly create a self-driving experience. As a front-end engineer, my job isn’t just to make the app look good; it’s to make the complex, heavy lifting happening on the backend (the stuff Jon and his team are “tuning”) feel invisible and effortless for you.

When we talk about rebuilding Piere from the ground up to be self-driving, this is the cabin feeling we’re aiming for:

• Removing the “Manual Work”: You shouldn’t have to spend your Saturday morning steering your budget. We’re redesigning the interface so that the most important actions happen automatically in the background with less input required.
• Intuitive Silence: A great user interface shouldn’t scream for your attention, and the best apps are meant to never be opened. We’re stripping away the clutter so that when you do look at Piere, you see only what matters, like the clarity you get when you finally step away from the noise of the city.
• Trust in the Foundation: Just like I trust the woods to keep growing while I’m sleeping, we want you to trust that Piere is optimizing your balances, making your Moves, and keeping your growth positive without you needing to micromanage the process.

We’re moving fast right now. In fact, this latest sprint is a notch shy of warp speed because we know how valuable peace of mind is, and we can’t wait to bring it to you. We’re rebuilding the engine and the dashboard at the same time so that eventually, you can spend less time looking at your money and more time at your own version of that cabin in the woods.

I might not be settling into that cabin this week, but as I look through the trees, the forest is plain as day.