How Multitudes Works
Learn how Multitudes collects and analyzes your team's data, and how you can use our features to improve your engineering team's performance.
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Learn how Multitudes collects and analyzes your team's data, and how you can use our features to improve your engineering team's performance.
Last updated
Was this helpful?
Multitudes integrates with the collaboration tools you already use, like GitHub for git management, Github Actions for CI/CD, or Linear and Jira for issue tracking. From there, we pull in metadata on Pull Requests (PRs), as well as data from comments, reviews, and tickets. We do not ingest your actual codebase.
Our metrics are based on research including DORA and SPACE, and detect outliers and trends that matter for your team – across team performance, collaboration, and wellbeing.
To give you a quick overview, we highlight key insights at-a-glance on the homepage and pair them with actions you might want to take.
Multitudes automatically suggests actions you might want to take with your team, based on trends in your team’s data. The following two features on our app’s homepage can get you taking action as soon as you log in. All team members have access to both features, but we’ve highlighted what might be useful to whom, based on our research.
At a glance view – Most useful for managers of managers, senior leaders, and executives
This is the first thing you’ll see at the top of the homepage when you log in. It is a higher-level overview representing how things are going across teams and the organization over the last 6 weeks. Here’s a more detailed explanation of how this insight is calculated and impacted by custom targets. The text at the bottom of this At a glance table shows when the thumb icon statuses and Actions were last updated.
Each team’s row will also have a dynamically generated Action in the last column at right. You can click on Action to access the associated Facilitation Guide.
Each Facilitation Guide includes data about the metric we’ve highlighted, ideas for questions you could ask to get more context, and potential experiments to help the team take action. These data-driven insights can add value to your team discussions, such as retros, around process improvements.
Trend Summary section – Most useful for teams and team leads
On the My Insights page under the At a glance section is the Trend Summary, a quick overview of our top 5 metrics organized as cards. Each card has a thumb icon status representing how it’s tracked over the selected date range. Here’s a more detailed explanation of how this insight is calculated and impacted by custom targets. Note that this thumb icon status is calculated differently, and may show a different value than the one in the At a glance table above. It also has a Take Action section below the chart, where you may see dynamically generated Actions. You can click Expand Actions to see more details.
In these Actions, we suggest things like:
specific PRs that need unblocking
a question to raise in a retro to get more context
someone to check in on during your next one-on-one (this can only be seen by that person and the people they have 1-on-1s with, per our data ethics principles)
something to celebrate with the team
When Actions are expanded, you can click the 🔗 icon on the headline of the expanded view to share a direct link to each Action.
Multitudes uses passive data from the collaboration tools your team uses, so once you’ve installed the app, Multitudes pulls out insights while your team works as normal. When you first sign up, we’ll even immediately give you insights based on your historic data!
Even better, we also give you updates and alerts within your workflow – via email or Slack. Direct us to your team’s Slack channel or your email inbox, and we’ll give you updates on things to celebrate and things to watch each week, blocked work that needs attention, people to check in on, and action steps you can take to resolve all of the above.
We look at equity and inclusion in practice. Because of systemic bias, good intent sometimes doesn’t translate to fair and equitable actions. That’s why Multitudes looks at behavior, not just intent. For example, we look at feedback received on PRs, and check whether anyone is getting less feedback. That’s because people from marginalized groups get less feedback than others.
First, our insights highlight changes and outliers in your data. This can help you spot changes in team dynamics, which can be easily missed. Often changes are missed due to unconscious biases, business pressures, or just the usual busy-ness of work life. We know that data is never the full picture, which is why we frame our insights and Actions as conversation starters, rather than judgements on how a team is going. For example, in the expanded view of Actions example below, we accompany insights with open-ended questions that probe at the human context behind the data.
Second, every team is different, so what “good” looks like will also be different. For that reason, we allow teams to customize targets. Since our insights are based on these targets, customization allows each team to work toward their own goals and to bring their own unique context.
As you take action, you can also track your progress in Multitudes – to make sure you live up to your own best intentions.
You can request access and start using Multitudes with a one-month free trial via the get a demo form.
Once you’ve been invited, you’ll need someone with GitHub admin access to help with set-up; they can install the Multitudes app in minutes and then we back-pull 6 weeks of historic data.
As part of the free trial, we ask that you do regular feedback sessions with us – to improve the app and shape our roadmap.
