Insights for managers: cycle time & throughput
Insights (Premium): cycle time, lead time, throughput, WIP, stuck work and release cost against the previous period, with definitions, roles, CSV and MCP.
What is Insights?
Insights is a page of numbers for managers. It answers “how fast does the team deliver”, “what is stuck, and with whom” and “what did this release cost”. Every number is computed from the cards’ status-move history (the commits of the md files), not by AI, so you get the same result every time you open it. It is a Premium feature.
- Per project: open the board and go to the Insights tab
- Per company: the company’s Insights page covers every project you can see, with a project table and stuck work per person across projects (company admins only)
- No new email: the weekly or monthly executive report of Automatic summaries links to the Insights page
Who sees what?
| Who | Sees | CSV export |
|---|---|---|
| Project admin | The whole project Insights tab, including the stuck-work table per person | Yes |
| Company admin | Every project and the company Insights page, people and agents included | Yes (the company file adds people.csv) |
| Plain member | Team-level numbers only, no per-person data | No |
| Free and Pro | A locked preview with an upgrade button (admins) or “ask your admin to upgrade” (members) | No |
Range and compare
- Pick 7 days, 30 days, 90 days, a quarter or a custom range (30 days by default; a custom range is at most 366 days)
- The previous period is the period of equal length right before, for example these 30 days against the 30 before
- Green / red says better / worse, and a ▲▼ arrow with a number is always shown (never colour alone). Less time is better, more throughput is better, and the agent share of writes is neutral
- The weekly trend chart: each point is a 7-day block counted back from the last day of the range
- All times are Asia/Bangkok, a day is 00:00–23:59 Thai time, and working days are Monday to Friday with no public holidays removed (the same as Automatic summaries)
Definitions
Press the ⓘ button on the Insights page to open these definitions at any time.
| Metric | How it is measured |
|---|---|
| Cycle time | From the first entry into an in_progress-category status → the latest entry into done. In days (1 decimal), calendar time including weekends. Shown as the median (the middle value) and p85 (85% of cards finished faster than this). A card reopened and finished again uses its latest done. A card is placed in a week or range by its done date |
| Lead time | From the card being created → done (median). It includes waiting in the backlog, so it is always longer than cycle time |
| Throughput | Cards and story points that reached done per week = total in range ÷ (days ÷ 7). A card without points counts as 0 pts but still as 1 card. It follows the done date, whether or not a sprint is still open |
| WIP and WIP limit | The cards in each column right now against the WIP limit you set. ▲ over the limit, ● at the limit, ✓ within it. A column with no limit gets a grey bar |
| Stuck work and card age | Stuck = a card in an in_progress-category status with no status move for at least n working days, where n is the project’s stuck setting, the same one Automatic summaries use (3 working days by default). Age = working days since the first entry into in_progress. “Oldest” is that person’s oldest card. Per-person detail is visible to project admins and company admins only |
| Agent share of writes | All writes on the board (comments, status moves, edits) made through any AI agent — Agent accounts and agents using a personal token or OAuth — ÷ all writes in the range. It is not a good / bad measure. The automatic reports BoardMark sends do not count as writes |
| Bugs opened vs closed | Opened = bug cards created in the range. Closed = bugs that reached done in the range (they may be older). The arrow compares closed − opened with the previous period; closing more than you open is better |
| Release cost | Story points and number of cards in the release, split feature / bug. No money, no labour cost. Feature = cards that are not bugs (including the cards of the epic linked to the release). Bug = type bug cards. Release cycle time = median / p85 of the release’s cards. Bugs after = bugs created in the project within 14 days after the day the release went to production; when releases overlap, the bug counts for the latest release shipped before it was created |
What does “measured n of m cards” mean?
Cycle time needs to know when a card first entered in progress. BoardMark has recorded status moves since 7 Oct 2026, and since then every way a status changes — dragging on the board, an import, an md file, an AI agent — records the move. A card with no recorded entry into in progress (moved before that date, or jumped straight to done) is therefore left out of cycle time, but still counts in lead time and throughput. Insights always says “measured n of m cards” so you know how many cards a cycle time is based on.
CSV export
Project admins and company admins press Export CSV on the Insights page and get a .zip with three files for the chosen range: metrics.csv (the metrics and the previous period), weekly.csv (week by week) and issues.csv (the cards counted). The company file adds a project_key column and a people.csv (per person). Every file is UTF-8 with a BOM, so Excel opens Thai text correctly. Plain members cannot export.
How do AI agents read Insights?
AI agents read Insights over MCP with two read-only tools. Setup and CSV export are web only.
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
get_project_insights | A project’s numbers (project_key, from and to as YYYY-MM-DD, default the last 30 days, compare). Per-person rows only when the token’s owner is a project admin |
get_company_insights | The numbers for every project of the company. The token’s owner must be a company admin, else 403 |
- Example prompts: “Insights for NOVA this month” or “What is our cycle time this quarter?”
- An agent should report the numbers as returned, say “measured n of m cards” when cycle time rests on partial data, and never invent per-person data it was not given
- It needs a token of a Premium company, and an Agent account has exactly its owner’s rights (it is never lifted to admin)