Slack Alerts

Set up Slack alerts to highlight blocked work and improve team collaboration.

Once you’re added as a user on the Multitudes app, you’ll automatically get weekly summaries via email that show how your team is doing along with suggested actions you may want to take.

If you’d prefer to get these via Slack, you can set up Slack alerts either in Settings > Integrations or directly from the homepage.

To set these up from the homepage: At the top section (My Insights), find any card, go to the lower “Take Action” section, and click the notification bell at top right. From there, connect to Slack and configure the alert for your preferred channel and time – then you’re good to go! We also suggest the Slack alert that’s best for improving the metric in question.

Once you’ve connected your workspace to Multitudes, add the `Multitudes for Slack` app to the relevant private channels. You can do this in two ways:

• Just type `@multitudes` in the channel, or
• Click on the channel name and go to Integrations > Add apps.

Those private channels should now be visible in the channel dropdowns when you’re configuring an alert, alongside all the public channels which are automatically visible.

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To improve your delivery, set up a Daily Blocked PRs alert. This sends a daily summary of pull requests that are awaiting action (e.g., a review, a conversation being resolved, or a merge) and were last updated 8+ hours ago. We recommend timing these to arrive before your daily stand-up, so you can discuss as needed there.

How to set it up

Who can set it up? Anyone with a Multitudes account – a Member, Manager, or Owner. Learn more about permissions here.

Prerequisites: You’ve already connected a Slack workspace to Multitudes. If you'd like the alert sent to a private channel, you should also add the Multitudes Slack app to that channel.

1. On the Multitudes app, in the side bar, navigate to Settings > Integrations.
2. Under “Alerts”, look for Slack and click “Configure”.
3. Click “Set up team alert”.
4. Making sure that “Daily Blocked PRs alert” is selected in the first dropdown, select the team and channel that should get the alert, and what time you would like it to be sent.
5. Hit “Save”. You should receive a confirmation message in the channel(s) you selected.

What does it include?

Summary of the past 3 days:

• PRs opened: The number of PRs that were opened. This includes PRs that were opened in a “draft” state.
• PRs merged: The number of PRs that were merged.

• Commits done out-of-hours: The number of commits that were created outside of the commit author’s usual working hours (as specified on the Team Settings page).

• These values are filtered for just the people on the selected team, in the past 3 days.

[NAME] has the most PRs awaiting review ([X] PRs)
This person has the most open PRs that don’t yet have any reviews.

Blocked PRs

• 🔨PRs awaiting review: These open PRs are yet to receive a review. A good opportunity to nudge someone to review this work!

• 👀PRs reviewed and awaiting action: These have had a review, so they’ve been waiting to be resolved and/or merged for more than 8 hours since they were last updated. Maybe worth checking to see if there’s a reply pending, or if it can be merged!

• This list only includes PRs that were last updated 8+ hours ago (where “updated” means a commit, edit, comment, or review). 

• Draft PRs are excluded. PRs that haven’t been updated in more than 7 days are also excluded, to avoid surfacing stale PRs.
• You can also exclude PRs from these alerts by adding the string “[do not merge]” in the PR title (case insensitive).

A Trend Summary is a type of Slack alert that shows how a team's metrics are trending, what they might want to focus on, and actions they could take together. Targets are based on academic research, domain knowledge, and industry benchmarks; this includes Google’s DORA metrics and the SPACE framework for developer productivity. For more on why we’ve chosen these measures and how we calculate them, check out this help article: What We Measure and Why.

How to set it up

Who can set it up? Anyone with a Multitudes account – a Member, Manager, or Owner. Learn more about permissions here.

Prerequisites: You’ve already connected a Slack workspace to Multitudes. If you'd like the alert sent to a private channel, you should also add the Multitudes Slack app to that channel.

1. On the Multitudes app, in the side bar, navigate to Settings > Integrations.
2. Under “Alerts”, look for Slack and click “Configure”.
3. Click “Set up team alert”.
4. Making sure that “Trend Summary” is selected in the first dropdown, select the team and channel that should get the alert and the frequency (weekly / fortnightly).
5. Hit “Save”. You should receive a confirmation message in the channel(s) you selected.

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What does it include?

The Trend Summary gives an at-a-glance view of how your team is doing across both team performance and people metrics. It tells you the metric for the last week/fortnight for a selected team (or your whole organization), and how it changed from the period before that.

Flow of Work: Lead Time

• Lead Time is an indicator of how long it takes to deliver value to customers; it shows the time from first commit to PR merge. 
• We show medians here as it is less likely to be skewed by outlier values, such as one PR with a very long wait time. You can also choose whether to exclude weekend hours – this defaults to off, but you can turn it on using the toggle when you set up the alert.
• Target: <= 24 hours
• In the actions, we highlight where work might be blocked so your team can move it along where needed.

Value Delivery: Merge Frequency

• Merge Frequency is an indicator of how much work is reaching customers; it shows the number of PRs that teams merged. Note that we only show this data at a team level, not an individual one – that's because PRs are a team sport. 
• Target: >= 2 PRs merged per person, per week
• In the suggested actions, we highlight things like which PRs were very large (since larger PRs take longer to review and merge, and so can reduce Merge Frequency).

Quality of Work: Change Failure Rate

• Fast delivery is great, but it shouldn’t come at the expense of quality. This DORA metric indicates the percentage of deployments that cause a failure in production. 
• Target: <=15%
• In the actions, we highlight where the failures happened so you can explore as a team.

Wellbeing: Out-of-Hours Work

• This looks at how often people are working late at night or on weekends. This is individually configurable, to account for people in different time zones and who work different hours (you can edit your working hours under Settings > Team Members > Edit profile).
• Target: <= 5 out-of-hours commits per person, per week
• The suggested actions show what work was done during concerning hours. If you or someone you do one-on-one’s with did a lot of out-of-hours work, we’ll also nudge you to discuss it in your next one-on-one.

Collaboration: PR Feedback Given

• Google’s Project Aristotle shows that participation across the team is a sign of psychological safety. This metric shows the average PR comments by team members. 
• Target: >10 comments per person
• The actions will highlight relatively complex PRs that were merged with few comments, people to celebrate for giving lots of feedback, or people to check in on to ensure they’re getting enough feedback (individual actions only appear to the individual and whomever does one-on-one’s with them.

A 1:1 prompt is a type of slack notification that shows the top 3 reflection ideas to discuss, based on a team member's data.

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Who is included in a 1:1 prompt? 
Anyone that is assigned to your Profile > 'Who you have 1:1s with'

When does this get sent? 
You can pick a day to receive this, at a weekly or fortnightly cadence.

How can I share this with my team member?
Once your team member has configured their Slack connection to the Multitudes app, they will receive a copy of the conversation starters. To do this, the team member must have access to the app.

What good looks like is context-dependent – it varies with the type of work you’re doing and the environment your team is working on.

To get you started with some industry benchmarks, check out our post on What We Measure and Why.

You may also want to compare current trends to your team’s historic trends – that’s why we pull in 6 weeks of historic data from the first day you start using Multitudes.

Finally, if you’d like to share trends and tactics with other engineering leaders who care about health performance, you can join #share-slack-summaries in our Multitudes Community Slack.