When onboarding with GitClear, the first step is to pick what repos to import, and the second step is to pick what role best describes the work you do on your team (e.g., Developer, Lead Dev, CTO, VP of Engineering, CTO, etc). After these steps are complete comes the reward, choosing what goals to focus on maintaining or improving ✨

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Choosing goals during the onboarding process. Actual goals shown depend on what role was chosen during the previous setup page.

This page will describe why and how you can make use of goals to create better outcomes on your team. You can jump straight to a section if you know what you'd like to learn about:

linkWhat goals are available?

GitClear offers a wide range of goals for teams to choose from:

linkPull request goals

linkGoogle DORA goals

linkProject health goals

linkTeam health goals

linkCode quality goals

linkWhere to see goal progress?

There are many ways to see how your team is performing relative to its goals.

link"Highlights" => "Notifications" tab

First, all of your team's resource notifications are shown on the "Highlights" page. "Missed goals" generate resource notifications, so they show in this list. As with non-goal notifications, you can configure which goal notifications should be "emailed" vs "shown on the dashboard." We use the role you chose when creating your GitClear account to allow an informed guess about which types of notifications earn an "email" notification (the bar is high -- GitClear is architected by devs, and devs hate nag emails). You can change how/if notifications are delivered to you from the Highlights tab, by clicking on the "Gear" icon.

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Configuring how goal notifications are delivered for this user/team pair

Every active goal that misses the mark will be shown in a list on the "Notifications" tab of the "Highlights" page. Most of the notifications can be

expanded to provide more granular detail.

linkEmail inbox

To the extent that you opt in to receiving periodic emails regarding the GitClear notifications you care about most, you will receive an email about any recently violated goals.

link "Highlights" => "Goals" tab

On the "Goals" tab of your "Highlights" section, we aggregate graphs that correspond to the goals you have set:

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Charts that correspond to the goals picked by our team

We recommend bookmarking this page in your browser to ensure that you can see how you're progress on your goals at any time with a single click. We also recommend making Chart Glimpses to publish your goal graphs on your existing team status dashboards (in Confluence, Company Wiki, Github Readme file, etc).

Further down on the "Goals" tab, all of your existing goals will be listed out. They will include a weekly history of the team's performance against the goal for each week in the past year, when the goal can be calculated retroactively (most can).

linkPerformance Reviews tab

By the end of 2024, GitClear will offer a report (to be implemented as its own first-class navigation tab) dedicated to summing up the year for a particular developer. We believe this report will shave hours off the time managers currently spend remembering what happened during the past year. It will also ensure devs get a fair shake, in terms of being recognized for their achievements 9, 10 or 11 months ago, instead of the strong "recency bias" that leaks into ad hoc dev reviews.

This page will automatically collect the developer's biggest achievements from the past year. Along with -- you guessed it -- a weekly summary of the developer's performance relative to the goals that the team's manager(s) set.

linkWhy set goals?

GitClear processes a lot of data to help teams make data-backed decisions.

On other help pages, you can read about measurements of team velocity, bug prevalence, pull request collaboration, and much more. All together, as of 2024, an Elite-level GitClear subscriber gets around 40-50 distinct charts they can look at to understand what is (or isn't) happening on their team.

On one hand, the prodigious collection of charts offered by GitClear sound like a "world of possibility." And it is a world of possibility. But, our customers are busy people who usually earn a lot of money to get things done. They are not people possessing time to leaf through 50 charts in search of the needle in the haystack that can reveal an insight relevant to their current problems. That's where goals step in.

We strongly recommend that every GitClear customer uses goals to extract the richest possible charts and data with pinpoint relevance to their situation.

Without goals, you still publish Chart Glimpses that let you build dashboards of the specific graphs that matter most to you. But it takes time to browse the graphs and to choose what options the chart should have. It can also be difficult to recognize when a particular chart has veered off into "time to fix" territory. For example, if pull request first review time is 3 business days, is that "good" or "bad"?

Goals fix both problems. When you pick a goal, the most pertinent chart illustrating the goal will be added to your "Highlights" tab. And when you click to activate a goal, you'll be given specific thresholds that range from a "very aggressive" value to a "very relaxed" value. But we're getting ahead of ourselves, let's now turn attention to providing specific examples of how goals work.

linkHow to set up goals?

You may first be asked to set up goals when you sign up for GitClear. If you are setting up a new account, GitClear will generally direct the user to goal setup after they have chosen their job title. You can choose your team's goals during this initial onboarding phase, or you can click the link to defer setup, which is located at the bottom of the onboarding "Goal Setup" page.

On GitClear, all goals are relative to a team. Any time you are logged in, you can view the goals for your team by visiting the Highlights tab and choosing "Goal Setup." Though GitClear tab names evolve periodically, what you see will probably look something like this:

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The Goal Setup tab allows choosing goals for a team

Setting up team goals can be performed for any team member with "Manager" access or above. If you only have "Developer" access, you can request that your manager changes your team setting on behalf of setting a goal.

linkWhat goals are available?

The number of goals supported by GitClear grows weekly. The goals that you will see upon visiting the "Goal Setup" page are relative to the job title ("role") that you chose when you initially signed up for GitClear. If you want to change the role that controls which goals you see, you can click the job title near the top of the page:

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Note that changing your job title will have no impact on your GitClear access or team role. It controls only what emphasis given to the various goals, pursuant to how the locus of control varies from role-to-role within a company.

linkGoal thresholds

All goals offer five suggested thresholds, plus a custom one that can be set. The goal thresholds range from "most aggressive" aka "noisiest" at the left side, over to "most relaxed" aka "quietest" at the right side:

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In this example, the manager would be notified if the median (anonymized) satisfaction score given by their team was below 7.

In general, the middle (auto-selected) threshold is the median value that GitClear has observed to be present on an average team. For all goals that are built from Diff Delta, thresholds are expressed in percentiles of industry norms.

If you want to perform in the 90th percentile of all companies, you can choose the leftmost goal, but be warned -- any goal that is configured to alert on an aggressive threshold will trigger a lot of notifications (whether emails or on-site notifications)

linkGoal limits

Different subscription levels allow access to varying levels of goals that can be monitored. The current goal limits are:

The goal limit is accumulated across all teams managed by the team's entity.

linkWho receives goal notifications?

When a goal fails to be met, notifications will be sent to:

As to "How are goal notifications delivered?" it is largely in line with the GitClear notification system in general: a user can visit their notifications list and configure whether they receive a particular notification "as an email," "in the notification dashboard," or "neither."

Whether the user initially receives notifications as an "email" or "dashboard-only" alert, the user's chosen role is used to determine this.

When visiting the "Highlights" -> "Goals Setup" page, a user can update their role if it changes during the course of their subscription.