About
Built by people who kept running into the same problem.
We kept discovering the same thing. Problems almost never started with bad people. They started because different people quietly believed different things, and nobody realised until it became expensive. Groundwork exists so leaders don't discover misalignment months after it starts.
We built Groundwork after repeatedly discovering problems months after they started. We hired too late. We missed disagreements that had quietly grown. We watched decisions get made from incomplete pictures, not because anyone was dishonest, but because there was no safe way to compare what everyone actually believed. Groundwork is the product we wanted.
The problem was never the people. It was that there was no way to find out without a meeting, without confrontation, without someone having to say it to someone else's face.
Groundwork is that place. You say what you need done. Your team says what they understood. You see where those two things match and where they do not. No meeting required.
Why it works
People tell the truth when they know nobody else will see their answer until the report is ready. That is the whole design. Private in, honest out.
Nobody is scored, ranked or watched. Groundwork never shows anyone's raw answers and never says who said what about whom.
If you are a founder
You are usually the only person holding the full picture. You made the decisions, set the direction, and communicated what you needed. But between what you said and what your team took away, something always gets lost. The further you are from the work, the harder it is to see where. Groundwork closes that gap. Not by adding another meeting or another tool to chase updates in. By giving every person a private place to say what they actually understood, what they have done, and where they are stuck, and giving you one clear picture of where things stand against what you set.
The product
Each person's own independent account, given privately. One clear picture for the person running it. Works for two people or twenty. Runs on a regular cadence for as long as the situation requires.
The company
Groundwork is an independent product. We built it because nothing else let every person give their own honest answer without the pressure of the room.
Built for founders, managers, team leads, programme directors, and anyone responsible for making sure a group of people are actually working toward the same thing. Built first for African leaders and the companies they run. Useful anywhere people start things together.
The team
Groundwork grew out of our own experience building and leading teams, and conversations with founders in the Google for Startups community facing many of the same problems.
Sahar Jamal | Team lead, and our people coach
Sahar is a certified personal and professional growth coach, and she has been coaching individual clients for about six years. She works with entrepreneurs, start-up teams, and emerging leaders inside larger organizations, on purpose-driven leadership, career progression, setting and actually reaching goals, building relationships across cross-cultural teams, and managing change and transitions. She is the coach who runs Guided sessions, which means she reads the report with your team in the room and turns what it found into a decision somebody owns.
She has led people herself, as founder and CEO of Maziwa in Kenya and in brand management at Johnson & Johnson and Reckitt Benckiser. She holds an ACC-level certificate from the International Coaching Federation, is a graduate of the Canada Coach Academy, and has an MBA from Northwestern. She has been performance coach on the McGowan Fund Fellowship Program, led coaching conversations training for the Global Good Fund, and mentors for Villgro Africa and the Stanford Biodesign Program.
Hafsah Jumare | Product strategy
Behavioral economist trained at the University of Cape Town who has spent the last 10 years building companies and leading teams across some of the world's toughest operating environments. A Google for Startups founder, Hafsah built Groundwork from firsthand experience of how hard it is to know what's really happening across a growing organization.
Nathanial Peterson | Behavioral Science
Behavioral scientist, venture builder, and co-founder of Peterson & Gill, a venture studio building investable companies out of complex public-sector problems. Nathanial holds a PhD in Behavioral Decision Research from Carnegie Mellon and brings deep expertise in decision-making, incentives, risk, and human behavior in complex systems.
Adam Grunewald | Client Success Engineer
Entrepreneur and technology executive who founded and led Lynk and previously worked at Google. Adam brings firsthand experience building companies, leading teams, and navigating the operational challenges that emerge as organizations grow.
Abubakar Sambo | Engineering
Engineer and technical lead behind Groundwork, with an engineering background from McGill University. Abubakar builds the systems that turn Groundwork's behavioral and organizational principles into a simple, secure product teams can use every day.
Our headquarters
Groundwork
9 Wendy Court, David Osieli Road
Westlands, Nairobi, Kenya
Questions or feedback
hello@myground.work