Investment Profile

LinearB's Investment Profile provides insights into how development efforts are distributed across various customizable categories, helping you track resource allocation and align them with business priorities. To access the Investment Profile, navigate to Resources > Investment Strategy.

Data Update Frequency:The Investment Profile is updated daily between 6:30 am UTC.

Investment Categories

KTLO (Keeping the Lights On)

KTLO refers to the essential tasks a company must perform to ensure daily operations run smoothly while maintaining service stability and reliability. These activities are critical for sustaining business continuity and providing a consistent customer experience.

Examples of KTLO tasks include:

• Maintaining Security Posture: Ensuring systems are secure against threats and vulnerabilities.
• Monitoring and Troubleshooting: Proactively monitoring services and addressing tickets or issues as they arise.
• Ensuring Service Uptime: Maintaining infrastructure to achieve consistent service availability and performance levels.

By effectively managing KTLO, organizations can ensure uninterrupted operations while allocating resources to strategic initiatives.

Developer Experience

• Improved Developer Tooling: Introducing or upgrading tools to simplify and optimize workflows.
• Testing Automation: Automating repetitive testing processes to reduce manual effort and errors.
• Code Restructuring: Refactoring and optimizing codebases to improve maintainability and scalability.
• Reducing Future KTLO Workload: Implementing measures to minimize ongoing operational burdens.

Examples of Developer Experience activities include:

Developer Experience refers to efforts aimed at enhancing the productivity, efficiency, and overall satisfaction of development teams in their daily work. These initiatives help create a seamless and effective development environment.

Feature Enhancements

Feature Enhancements focus on improving existing features or delivering updates that enhance customer satisfaction and experience. These actions ensure the product remains competitive and valuable to users.

Examples of Feature Enhancements include:

• Customer-Requested Improvements: Implementing feedback to address specific user needs.
• Performance Optimization: Enhancing system efficiency and resource utilization.
• Adoption and Retention Efforts: Iterating on features to improve usability, adoption rates, and customer retention.
• Reliability and Security Enhancements: Strengthening product reliability and addressing security vulnerabilities.

New Value

New Value represents investments in creating new features or capabilities that drive business growth through customer acquisition or expansion. This category focuses on delivering innovation that increases revenue and market share.

Examples of New Value initiatives include:

• Introducing New Features: Designing and implementing capabilities to meet emerging customer demands.
• Supporting New Platforms: Expanding compatibility with additional platforms or partner applications.
• Implementing Roadmap Items: Delivering planned strategic features to achieve business objectives.

Inefficiency Pool

The Inefficiency Pool highlights areas where engineering teams can reclaim capacity by addressing inefficiencies in the development lifecycle. These inefficiencies often result from delays, bottlenecks, or resource mismanagement that waste valuable time and effort.

LinearB's Inefficiency Pool provides an estimate of the resource potential that can be unlocked by implementing efficiency improvements, such as reducing pull request (PR) idle times.

How It Works

The Inefficiency Pool is calculated using the following factors:

1. Pull Request Idle Time:
   • Time wasted while PRs remain idle without review or action.
2. Number of Full-Time Employees (FTEs):
   • Total number of FTEs in your organization contributing to the development process.
3. Total Workdays:
   • The total number of workdays in the specified time period under review.

These factors are combined to provide an estimate of the portion of your resource pool that could be recovered through better workflow efficiency.

Enabling or Disabling the Inefficiency Pool

You can toggle the Inefficiency Pool feature as follows:

1. In the Investment Strategy window, click Configure.
2. Navigate to Investment Benchmarks.
3. Check or uncheck the Inefficiency Pool box.
4. Click Save & Close to apply your changes.

Configuring the Investment Profile

To customize which project management (PM) tool issues are collected in each investment category:

1. Click the Configure icon at the top right of the Investment Profile page.
2. Select the category you want to edit and:
   • Edit Rule: Modify existing filters.
   • Add Rule: Add new filters.
   • Note: Each category can include up to 3 rules.

Boolean Logic for Rules:

• Adding multiple items within the same filter type (e.g., boards) combines them with an OR operator.
• Adding different filter types (e.g., boards and labels) combines them with an AND operator.

Description	To include issues of type "Bug" with prioriteis "Highest", or "Blocker", or "Critical", or "High", or "Major"
Boolean	(Type:"Bug") AND (Priority:"Highest" OR "Blocker" OR "Critical" OR "High" OR "Major")
LinearB Interface

Filtering Options:

1. Issue Types: Select specific issue types (e.g., "Bug," "Task").
   Note: Selecting "Bug" won’t automatically include subtypes like "Critical Bug."
2. Labels: Filter by exact PM tool labels applied to tickets (case-sensitive).
3. Custom Fields: Supports both string and number fields, requiring an exact match.
4. Keywords: Search for text in issue types or summaries (case-insensitive).
   • Note: Keywords don’t require an exact match and will include all relevant issue types.

Viewing and Troubleshooting Issues

To view the issues in a specific category:

1. Click on the category in the graph.
2. Click View Issues at the bottom right.

   

This is especially useful for troubleshooting the Other Work (Unclassified) section. By reviewing these issues, you can identify items that aren't captured by your filters and refine your configuration.

Filter by Teams or Business Units

To narrow down the work breakdown:

1. Use the filter menu at the top of the Investment Profile page.
2. Select specific filters to view data relevant to your team, business unit, or product line.

For more granular breakdowns (e.g., per project or initiative), consider using Product Delivery Tracker or Project Forecasting.

This approach is most effective when breaking work down by business unit or product line, especially in cases where work distribution varies significantly between areas. For more granular breakdowns, such as filtering by specific projects or initiatives, it’s recommended to use tools like the Product Delivery Tracker or Project Forecasting instead.

Summary

The Investment Profile offers a detailed view of resource allocation across categories, allowing teams to optimize efforts and improve efficiency. By leveraging customizable filters and regularly updated data, you can ensure that development efforts align with organizational priorities and goals.