Earkeep for product owners

A product owner's job, in the Scrum Guide's own words, is to maximize "the value of the product resulting from the work of the Development Team." That means owning one backlog everyone trusts as the single source of truth: what gets built next, and why.

In practice, the value decisions that should live in that backlog happen out loud, not in Jira. They happen in a refinement session, in a sprint review where a stakeholder half-commits to a change, in a five-minute huddle with a developer who needed one clarification to unblock a ticket, in a demo where a senior stakeholder hands over a pre-built solution and everyone nods along. None of that gets typed anywhere in the moment, because the person running the ceremony is also the person who's supposed to be deciding and participating, not transcribing. Everything below comes back to the same question: how do captured meetings keep the backlog matching what was actually decided.

Ask product owners how they track this and the answer is consistent: they don't, reliably, and it costs them later.

"Requirements often change through stakeholder meetings, client demos, Teams/Slack conversations, or emails before they actually make it back into the backlog," one product owner wrote, describing the exact failure mode. "It leads to questions like: 'When did we agree to this?' 'Was this discussed after Sprint Planning?'" Two sprints later, nobody can answer that with confidence, so the backlog stops being trusted and every disputed requirement turns into an argument about who remembers what.

The ceremony load makes this worse before it gets better. A product owner typically runs daily scrum, one or two refinement sessions a week, sprint planning, and the sprint review, on top of stakeholder meetings and demos, and in under-staffed teams often absorbs the Scrum Master's and business analyst's meetings too. One described running "all the ceremonies, you name it: planning, refinement, retrospectives, do scrumpoker even," while also writing PRDs and talking to stakeholders and users. There is no spare capacity in that week for also being the notetaker.

Even when a product owner tries to take notes personally, the job doesn't allow it. "I seem to be able to do one at a time, but need to be doing all 3 concurrently," one wrote about facilitating, contributing, and note-taking in the same meeting. Something has to give, and it's usually the notes, which means the backlog inherits whatever the PO half-remembers afterward.

Then there's the drive-by: "A senior stakeholder or executive will come into a meeting, bypass the actual problem space entirely, and hand over a highly specific, pre-built feature solution," as one product owner put it, adding that "the standard reaction is usually compliance." Without a transcript, that moment disappears into "someone asked for this" instead of a scope change the PO can hold up to proper prioritization.

Earkeep's in-app agents and MCP server are built to feed the tools a product owner already lives in, not to replace them. A refinement transcript or a stakeholder demo doesn't stay a transcript; it becomes backlog input:

• Run Claude Code, Codex, Cursor Agent, Gemini CLI, Hermes, Kimi CLI, or any ACP-compatible agent directly inside Earkeep against a kept span, and ask it to draft acceptance criteria from what was actually discussed in refinement, or reconcile a sprint review against the current ticket to flag where they've drifted.
• The built-in MCP server exposes kept meetings to any MCP-capable tool, so an agent working in your normal setup can pull the exact stakeholder quote from a demo and paste it straight into the Jira comment or Confluence decision page where your team already looks for context.
• Because transcripts are plain local files, nothing about this depends on a vendor integration existing. If your team links Confluence pages from tickets today, the agent step produces that page from the transcript rather than asking you to remember what to write.
• No bot joins the ceremony to do this. Product owners already field the running joke about standups with two AI notetakers in them from different team members; Earkeep adds no second participant to any meeting, because it listens from the PO's own machine.

Most product owners already run Jira or Azure DevOps for the backlog, Confluence for decision context linked from tickets, and something like OneNote or live shared notes projected in the room. None of those capture what was said; they capture what someone had time to type while also running the meeting. Earkeep doesn't replace your backlog tool, it feeds it:

• Meeting notetaker bots join the call as a visible participant and send audio to their own servers: see vs Otter, vs Fireflies, vs Fathom, and vs tl;dv. Earkeep has no bot and no upload step.
• Granola shares the "no bot" instinct but is cloud-processed and still asks you to type notes during the meeting: see vs Granola.
• Manual local transcribers like MacWhisper are local but require starting and stopping a recording per meeting, one file at a time: see vs MacWhisper. Earkeep is always-on with retroactive spans, so nothing depends on remembering to start it before the stakeholder ambush begins.

€39, once, for one device. No per-seat license, no monthly bill to justify to procurement, no tiers to negotiate. Try the full app free for 14 days, no email, no account required, then buy with a 14-day money-back refund if it doesn't fit. See full pricing details →