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Tech Lead & Developers

Heather Hazell
  • Updated

This guide is for developers and tech leads who want a clear, practical way to use LinearB for personal growth, healthier review habits, and smoother delivery — without turning metrics into a scorecard. It focuses on the views and signals that help you reduce friction, improve collaboration, and build durable ownership.

Time Required: 8–12 minutes to orient, 15–20 minutes to set a lightweight rhythm
Difficulty: Easy

TL;DR

  • Use Developer Coaching to understand your work patterns, workload signals, and knowledge areas.
  • Use team-level views like Metrics → Delivery and Teams → Iterations to understand the system you’re operating in.
  • Keep PRs reviewable and easy to understand — this is one of the fastest ways to improve flow.
  • Use gitStream to make good practices consistent with low noise.
  • Use AI Insights as a shortcut to patterns, then validate against the underlying data.

Overview

LinearB helps you see how your real Git activity translates into delivery outcomes and team health. For developers, the most valuable use is not “tracking a number,” but spotting patterns you can improve: review habits, work in progress, PR size consistency, and knowledge distribution.

This guide helps you:

  • Build sustainable delivery habits.
  • Improve code review efficiency and clarity.
  • Reduce bottlenecks you influence directly.
  • Identify where you may be a key knowledge owner — and when that becomes a risk.
  • Adopt automation that reduces toil without adding noise.

What you likely care about

  • Am I working in a sustainable way?
  • Are my PRs easy to review and merge?
  • Do I understand where I’m most impactful?
  • Is my team’s review process slowing us down?
  • Where do we need better standards or automation?

Where to spend time in LinearB

Teams → Coaching (if enabled)

Your most direct, growth-oriented view. Coaching aggregates patterns around delivery behavior, workload signals, knowledge areas, and contribution trends.

  • Use it to understand your personal patterns over time.
  • Bring it into 1:1s to align on support, growth goals, and workload balance.
Metrics → Delivery

Your team’s flow view. This helps you understand where the system is slowing down so you can support fixes that actually matter.

  • Look for stage-level friction that you can influence:
    • PR size and clarity
    • review responsiveness
    • handoff patterns
Teams → Iterations (Completed)

Useful for understanding how planned work compares to what actually shipped and where unplanned work is coming from.

  • Helps you spot “shadow work” that never got linked cleanly.
gitStream

gitStream is the most practical way for developers and tech leads to reduce process overhead. It turns lightweight standards into consistent PR behavior with minimal noise.

  • Use it to support:
    • low-noise AI review and AI descriptions
    • safe-change patterns
    • consistent PR hygiene checks
AI Insights

AI can help summarize patterns across delivery and planning and highlight risks worth validating. Treat AI outputs as a starting point for discussion, not the final truth.

Start here in 15 minutes

Developer quick-start checklist
  1. Open Teams → Coaching (if available) and review your workload and contribution patterns for the last 30–90 days.
  2. Check your Knowledge Areas signals to see where you may be a primary owner.
  3. Open Metrics → Delivery for your team and identify the slowest stage trend.
  4. Pick one habit to test over the next sprint:
    • smaller PRs
    • clearer PR descriptions
    • faster early review engagement
  5. If your team uses gitStream, review the current rules and suggest one low-noise improvement.

Key signals to pay attention to

Focus on signals that map to daily choices and team coordination:

  • PR size and reviewability trends.
  • Review participation patterns and responsiveness.
  • Work in progress signals (to avoid overload).
  • Knowledge concentration patterns (to reduce single points of failure).
  • Unlinked work patterns in Iterations (when relevant).

Recommendation: What tech leads should emphasize

  • Align on a simple PR hygiene standard your team can explain in 2–3 sentences.
  • Use Delivery trends to choose one improvement theme per sprint.
  • Spread ownership in high-risk knowledge areas.
  • Partner with your EM to adopt gitStream guardrails that reduce review load.

Metrics to prioritize

  • PR size and reviewability trends.
  • Team Cycle Time stage patterns.
  • Workload/knowledge concentration signals (if Coaching is enabled).

Recommended operating rhythm

Weekly

  • Check your personal patterns in Coaching (if enabled).
  • Review team Delivery trends to understand the current bottleneck.

Per sprint

  • Use Iterations to confirm planned vs. unplanned patterns.
  • Choose one small behavior change to test as a team.

Common pitfalls

  • Assuming metrics are a personal score instead of improvement signals.
  • Trying to fix too many habits at once instead of one small change per sprint.
  • Ignoring knowledge concentration until it becomes a delivery risk.
  • Over-automating early before the team agrees on the simplest standards.

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